


You Can't Read That In A Museum

by follow_the_sun



Series: Team Stegosaurus vs. the Universe [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Night at the Museum (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Civil War Fix-It, Crossover, Dinosaurs, Happy Ending, M/M, Magical Accidents, Magical Artifacts, Museums, Mutual Pining, Noble Idiots, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Team Stegosaurus, These Two Ancient Nerds, dad jokes, screw canon, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 22:23:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7863505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a way to fix Bucky's brain. It just involves sneaking into the New York Museum of Natural History after nightfall. What could go wrong?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. longing

**May 2016**

Bucky comes to with his metal arm in a vise and the echo of the reset code in his head. It comes back to him slowly, bits and pieces at first, a sense memory here and there, and then, suddenly, all of it in a rush: Bucharest, Steve, running, the nightmare apparition that he’d dismiss as a hallucination if the ring of claws on stone wasn’t still so fresh in his mind. The highway. Failure. Men in SWAT gear. The box. The psychiatrist, except that he wasn’t. The reset.

The reset.

Hydra has him.

Bucky’s eyes sting, and he lowers his head. He’s always known that this was a possibility. Every day of freedom could have been his last, ever since D.C. And the truth is, he’s not sorry for any of it. He won’t apologize for defending himself from a SWAT team that planned to shoot him on sight, and anything he did after the code words is squarely the fault of whoever gave the order.

His only real regret is what he did to Steve.

He doesn’t mean getting him arrested, either. Steve is Captain America _and_ he’s besties with the U.S. military’s pet arms dealer, so even if anybody has the nerve to press charges, it’s not like they’re going to stick. But when Steve turned around and asked if Bucky remembered him… He panicked, okay? He panicked and lied because he’s an idiot and he hurt Steve by doing it and that’s the one thing in this whole clusterfuck that he can’t blame on anyone but himself.

Well, at least he won’t have to regret it for long.

This time, they’d damn well better break him beyond repair. Nothing can make the Chair into a mercy, but this time, he hopes they’ll put him so far under that Bucky Barnes can never come up for air again.

He’s planting his feet up on the slippery concrete floor and tugging at his arm, because the outward show of resistance is literally all he has left, when he hears footsteps approach, then stop. Somebody says, “Steve,” and for a second, he thinks some HYDRA bastard has come taunt him with the memory of his fuckup before they take it away from him permanently, but then he realizes that it’s Sam Wilson’s voice.

Блядь, this is so much worse.

 _No,_ he pleads silently, inside of his head, not even knowing who he’s asking for mercy anymore. _No, no, no, no, no._ But as usual, it turns out nobody’s willing to cut a poor broken кретин a break, because he looks up through the curtain of dark hair that’s fallen in front of his eyes just in time for Steve to come around the corner.

“Which Bucky am I talking to?” he says, and Bucky’s stomach twists. Steve’s face is expressionless, but his eyes tell Bucky that he’s doing the thing he always does at times like this: he’s bracing himself up to pick up the pieces of his shattered heart and do what needs to be done.

Christ, Bucky’s a wretched excuse for a human being. If he was half the man he should be, he’d snap Steve’s last slender thread of hope on the spot. Go cold, answer in русский, convince them that there’s no trace of James Buchanan Barnes left inside the monster and that they have to put it down. Wilson is obviously expecting him to do just that, because Bucky recognizes the look on his face, too: it’s the “Steve, don’t be an idiot” look, the “I can’t believe I’m about to have to wade in and clean up another of your heroic messes” look.

He knows _that_ look from the face he saw in the mirror from 1928 to 1944.

“Your mom’s name was Sarah,” he hears himself say, and a silent, helpless bubble of laughter wells up in his chest, because he is such an unbelievably huge fuckup that he can’t even die right. It’s selfish and awful, but he wants to _live,_ goddammit. “You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.”

Steve doesn’t move, barely even changes expression, but his eyes are so full of feeling that the oldest, deepest fault line in Bucky’s unstable heart begins to crack.

“Steve,” Wilson says, in a warning tone, and if Bucky had both hands free, he’d applaud the fact that Steve’s finally managed to get himself a friend who isn’t an idiot.

“Your favorite dinosaur is the triceratops,” he says.

Steve blinks. “What?”

“You made me go see _Fantasia_ three times,” Bucky says, and oh, Christ, there’s nothing funny about this situation, so why the hell does he want so badly to laugh? “And every single time, you bitched about how the best dinosaur was barely in it.”

 _“I_ went three times. I only took _you_ once, because you started bawling when the cartoon stegosaurus died,” Steve says, and then he looks shocked at himself. Well, that makes one of them who’s surprised that Steve’s mouth still engages before his brain does.

“At least I didn’t spend the next two weeks drawing naked centaur girls and claiming it was for _art school,”_ Bucky says, almost choking on barely suppressed hysteria. Well, if he dies today, at least he’ll have had the satisfaction of seeing Steve’s new sidekick look like he’s about to shit a brick.

Steve stares at him in complete shock. Then he turns to Sam, raises one eyebrow, and says, “You can’t read about that in a museum.”

“And just like that, we’re supposed to be cool?” Wilson says sharply, and Bucky snaps back to reality so hard that it gives his damaged brain a case of mental whiplash. Because Wilson’s words are a sharp reminder that he doesn’t _get_ the kind of life with movie tickets, or favorite dinosaurs, or candy bars stashed on top of the fridge. He doesn’t get to visit his sister on her birthday, or text terrible jokes to Daisy Johnson just because he feels like it, or reminisce with Steve about the bright spots in a past bookended by two world wars. He’s not the Asset anymore, but he’s still the Winter Soldier. Steve might forget that, but nobody else ever will.

“What’d I do?” he asks, and Steve’s face tells him everything he needs to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ummmmmmmmmm.
> 
> I MAY have hit "Post Chapter" instead of "Save Draft" by accident.
> 
> Well, I guess those of you who wanted a new Team Stegosaurus fic are getting the first installment a little earlier than anticipated.
> 
> (And for anybody who's new here, hi! I'm follow_the_sun. I write crossover fic in which I am oddly earnest and serious about having Bucky Barnes punch dinosaurs in the face.)


	2. rusted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It shouldn’t be necessary to read previous fics in this series, but this chapter is full of Easter eggs for anyone who did. However, it may be helpful to read the (short!) fic [You Called Her Dot](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7279456), which contains an important scene-setting moment.

**One superhero civil war later…**

Bucky isn’t used to waking up in a bed.

Okay, so maybe that’s not strictly true anymore. In the two years between D.C. and Romania, he spent more nights in cheap motel beds than he did sleeping in ditches or abandoned bunkers, and if the futon and sleeping bag in his Bucharest hideout were more tactical than comfortable, they were a whole lot better than the floor. But waking up out of _cryo_ in a bed instead of the Chair, that’s practically unthinkable. He knows he’s still in a medical facility—stale air and antiseptic smells haven’t changed much in seventy years—and this is probably as much for their convenience as his comfort, but it feels like an unbelievable luxury, all the same.

Nobody ever put the Asset in a bed. That would be like putting a gun in a bed, or a hammer.

As for waking up with Steve beside him—well, a long time before they slept in a two-man tent that they took turns hauling back and forth across Europe, they’d shared a bed on rare occasions: if, say, the Buchanan cousins were visiting from Indiana and everybody had to double up, or if the heat in the building went out. Bucky had always tried to find a way out of it back then, because he was always a little bit terrified that Steve might somehow know how much he liked it. But now that his secret’s out and it turns out Steve isn’t disgusted at all by the fact that Bucky’s been pining for him since approximately 1932, has even allowed as how he might be a little bi-curious himself and could see his way fit to give this crazy thing between them a shot… Now, waking up with Steve’s arms around him and Steve’s breath warm against his hair, Bucky wants to sink further down into the pillows and stay there forever.

He wants it just a little less than he wants to _see_ Steve, and that’s the thing that finally makes him roll over and open his eyes.

Steve looks good. His hair is shorter, a little blonder from the Wakandan sun, and he’s well-fed and practically glowing with good health. The fact that their faces are inches apart is probably the only reason Bucky notices the purple shadow of a fading bruise on his cheekbone and knows it hasn’t been all sunshine and lollipops since he went under.

“Which Bucky am I talking to?” he asks, in a low, gentle voice.

Bucky’s voice is hoarse from disuse—or at least, that’s the story he’ll stick to if anyone questions him. “Howard Stark’s flying car,” he says. “Remember he brought it to London, crashed it in Trafalgar Square?”

“That’s in all the biographies,” Steve says, with a hint of wariness. “Everybody knows that.”

“I ever tell you I got to third base with a WAAC from Omaha in that car three hours before he crashed it?”

Steve gives him a look that’s a combination of relieved and miffed. “You always start off by trying to make your date jealous?”

“Oh, is this a date? I thought it was a booty call.”

Damn, it’s good to hear the sound of Steve’s laughter. After everything, part of Bucky was afraid he’d never hear that again. “How do you even know what that means?”

“C’mon, Steve, did you think I was just sitting around that dump in Bucharest for two years? I had a life. I had _adventures._ I punched a dinosaur in the _face.”_

“Now you’re really trying to make me jealous.”

“If that was true, I’d just tell you about Lola.”

“Lola who?” Steve says, and oh, _wow,_ he shouldn’t be this turned on by the way Steve’s voice goes a little bit dark there.

“Relax, pal. Lola’s not a dame, she’s a flying car. Belongs to your buddy Phil.” At Steve’s blank look, he clarifies, “You know, Phil Coulson? From SHIELD?”

“What? Buck, Phil Coulson died in 2011.”

“Jesus, Steve, would you use your brain for two seconds? You, me, Fury, Zola—do you really still believe anybody’s dead just because they died?”

“That’s not funny, Buck,” Steve says, and too late, Bucky realizes he’s thinking of Peggy.

“Sorry,” he says softly. “Coulson’s alive, though. I mean, last I heard, he was. Shit,” he says, as a terrible thought occurs to him. “How long was I in cryo?”

Steve’s face falls. “Oh my God, I should’ve told you. Bucky… it’s been eighteen years.”

_“What?”_ Bucky yelps, almost spinning out into a blind panic right there. What about all the people he cares about? What about Minnie and Daisy and Alisha and… and… and Steve, the asshole, is _smirking._ “Jesus Christ, you fucking _troll._ Did it ever occur to you that you shouldn’t mess around with the brain-damaged guy like that?” he says, flopping back to the bed. “How long has it been really?”

“About eleven weeks,” Steve says, laughing. “And you started it. Phil Coulson might be alive, but there’s no way in hell he has a flying car.”

“Language, Rogers,” Bucky says, and it’s such an automatic reflex that it almost brings tears to his eyes when he realizes he _remembers_ that old inside joke, that he’s _allowed_ to remember it. “If those CIA goons hadn’t taken my cell phone, I’d call him right now and prove it.”

“Oh, really,” Steve says, and leans over to reach for something on the floor by the bed. Bucky’s jaw drops when he sees it: his backpack. The go-bag with all the scattered bits of his history in it that he was willing to go back to the crappy Bucharest apartment and risk his freedom for. And Steve just set it there like it’s no big deal. He makes a grab for it, around the IV line running into the back of his right hand and the wires connecting little sticky tabs on his chest to a vital signs monitor, and tugs on the zipper until Steve ends up opening it for him, which is marginally less humiliating than using his teeth. The burner phone Daisy Johnson gave him is in its proper pocket, but Steve must have taken it out and charged it up before they woke him; notifications start popping up as soon as he taps the screen, and he sets the phone on the bed so he can scroll through them one-handed. “How did you get this?”

“I might be a criminal now, but I still have friends. And so do you, apparently. Speaking of which, you’ve got explaining to do, Sergeant.” Steve pretends to look stern, and fails. “For one thing, who’s Owen Grady and why does he think _you’re_ Captain America?”

“Jesus Christ,” Bucky says. “I told him I’m not… Okay, it’s sort of a long story.”

“And this guy whose voicemails sound like a bad impression of Thomas Jefferson?”

“See, that’s funny, because Crane actually knew Thomas Jefferson when he was… Uh, that’s also a long story.”

“Yeah, and Pete Lattimer’s another long story, I imagine.”

“Nah, Pete’s family. My grand-nephew, as a matter of fact. Oh,” Bucky says, as the relevant text pops up, “but the part about the robot with laser eyes? _That_ is a long story.”

Yeah, Steve’s full-throated laugh is definitely everything Bucky has been missing for the last seventy years. …Well, almost everything. And Steve has the same thought almost at the same time, because he leans forward and puts a hand on Bucky’s good right shoulder. “See,” he says, “that right there is why I love you, Barnes.”

Bucky lowers his eyes and tries not to smile like the biggest dork in the entire world. “Aren’t you moving a little fast, there, soldier?”

“Right, I forgot I’ve only known you for _most_ of a century,” Steve says, leaning toward him, and there’s that little crinkle in his forehead that Bucky noticed for the first time back when they were both nothing but a pair of Brooklyn brats, and oh, wow, Steve is just going for it, isn’t he, and somehow his lips are even softer now than last time, and fuck Zemo and his stupid мщение nonsense, Steve’s eyes are blue, they’re so blue, there’s no green in them at all—

And then, without warning, Bucky is out of bed and across the room, back against the furthest wall from the bed, the stump of his left arm turned outward as if the capped-off socket still has any protection to offer. An alarm is blaring somewhere, and Bucky is shaking, staring at the blood on his hand, there’s blood on his hand, there’s blood, почему так много крови—

“Barnes.” Somebody is kneeling in front of him. “Barnes! Look at me. You know me?”

Bucky gasps for breath, almost choking. “Wilson.” Shit, how did Sam get here so fast? If his conversation with Steve was being monitored, Bucky is going to fall over dead right here and now.

“You’re having a panic attack,” Sam says, gripping him by both shoulders—well, one shoulder and what’s left of the other. “Listen to me and this can be over in two minutes, okay? It’s 2016. You’re in Birnin Zana, in Wakanda. You’re safe. Say it back to me.”

“Twenty-sixteen,” Bucky repeats. “Birnin… Birnin Zana. I’m…”

He can’t quite bring himself to say the last word, but his breathing is evening out, so Sam lets it slide. “You pulled your IV out, dumbass. Gimme your hand and I’ll wrap it up for you, okay?”

“Yeah.” Bucky’s breathing is starting to settle down. He knows how to do this, how to focus on what he can see and touch, to ground himself in the moment. He just… дерьмо, he just freaked out, and he doesn’t understand why. It’s not that he hasn’t touched anybody since the conditioning broke. He even kissed Steve once already, before this latest round of cryo. And it’s _Steve,_ for God’s sake, Steve who’s everything he’s ever wanted, maybe the only person in the world who he can trust completely, who trusts him completely.

_Well, maybe that’s the fucking problem, genius._

“Is Steve okay?” he asks.

Sam casts a quick glance back over his shoulder, still pressing the gauze against Bucky’s hand. Sure, _Sam_ can touch him and everything’s hunky-dory. “You didn’t throw a punch or anything, if that’s what you mean,” he says. And then, a little more kindly, “Listen, it’s your first time coming out of cryo since everything happened. It’s no surprise that you got a little freaked out. You want to tell me what set you off so we can work on avoiding that in the future?”

Oh, Bucky emphatically does _not_ want to tell Sam what set him off. “Why did they wake me up?” he says instead, because after all, isn’t this fucked-up freakout exactly the kind of thing he was supposed to be avoiding by staying on ice?

“Steve didn’t tell you?” Sam doesn’t smile—he’s still trying too hard to pretend he’s grudgingly putting up with Bucky, which is fine, because Bucky is doing the same thing; hell if he’s _ever_ going to admit how much he likes this asshole—but his eyebrows lift in an unmistakably pleased expression. “You know how you wanted us to look for something to fix your brain? We think we found it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for some credits! 
> 
> So IDK what dark magic led to HunterPeverell suggesting a Night at the Museum crossover during the very week I was in NYC, being SUPER EXCITED to visit the American Museum of Natural History for the first time. 
> 
> FirePony16 added a suggestion that really lodged this concept in my brain. 
> 
> As always, Robyngoodfellow is my ever-present help in times of swearing at super soldiers.


	3. seventeen

Bucky Barnes sticks out like a sore thumb in Wakanda, which is kind of a hassle but also kind of a relief. The news media here has spun a very different story about him and Steve than they did in Europe, and T’Challa’s protection means nobody is actually gunning for him, but it also means that whether people are supportive or leery, there are few who don’t recognize him on sight. Even if his face hadn’t been splashed all over TV, he’s one of a handful of white guys in the entire country _(and wouldn't Gabe Jones get a kick out of that,_ he thinks), not to mention that he has one arm, for fuck’s sake. And even if all of those things weren’t true, he’d still be marked by the fact that everywhere he goes, a couple of T’Challa’s Dora Milaje follow him. They don’t wear uniforms, but it’s like being tailed by a plainclothes cop; anybody who knows what they’re looking for can spot it right away.

Steve was really mad when he found out about that. Almost went storming off to the palace to make a scene before Bucky got a chance to tell the dumb shit that he’d _insisted_ on it.

Wanda Maximoff, on the other hand, fits into Wakanda like she was born there. There’s something about the way this society works that’s completely alien to Bucky’s mind: they’ve got all this crazy vibranium-enhanced technology that puts Stark Industries’ R&D department to shame, and yet, somehow, here comes Wanda, and people are like, _Oh, magic is your thing? Good for you, my grandmother did a little magic but I don’t have the knack for it, have you tried the bogobe?_

Wanda’s not quite as notorious as him and Steve right now, so with a fake ID and some changes to her hair and makeup, she’s established a cover as a Polish graduate student who’s here as part of a thing called _cultural exchange_. She’s been spending a lot of her time interviewing the older Wakandans about their magical practices. Most of it doesn’t apply to what she does, she says, but some of their tips have been helpful in fine-tuning her control.

Bucky isn’t really interested in her magic—he saw just enough of it on display at the German airport to be unnerved by it, and after everything he’s been through in his life, that is saying something—but he’s very interested in the fact that everywhere she goes, people feed her, and when she finds something especially good, she asks for the recipe. Wanda loves to cook, or at least, so she claims. From the frown that briefly crosses her face when she says it, he privately suspects there’s some kind of complicated culinary fuck-you going on. But again, Bucky doesn’t really care why she’s learning how to make every delicious Wakandan dish that comes her way. He cares _deeply_ about the fact that if he hangs around long enough, she usually invites him to stay for dinner.

(“You’re a mooch,” Steve said, the first time he came home so stuffed that he practically rolled through the door of their shared living quarters. Bucky didn’t deny it. When it comes to food, he’s a shameless opportunist. He’d gone to bed hungry too many times in his life even before he got saddled with a metabolism nearly as fast as Steve’s, and the one time he tried to stockpile some food like a good little Depression baby, things went south so fast it made his head spin.)

(He’s still bitter about those goddamn plums.)

“So what’s on the menu tonight?” he asks, as they walk through the market with today’s silently lethal Dora Milaje guardian following ten yards behind them.

“Mogatla with matlebekwane,” Wanda tells him. Even with her heavy Sokovian accent, her pronunciation is pretty good. He’s never met anybody before, with the possible exception of Gabe Jones, who picks up language the way he does, absorbing the background chatter until it all comes together in sudden fluency. “Oxtail stew with dumplings.”

“Wow, that sounds really good.”

“You just want me to keep feeding you,” Wanda says, with a little laugh. Good; he and Steve aren’t really talking much—it’s surprisingly, heartbreakingly easy not to talk to Steve right now—but Steve has managed to let him know that he thinks Wanda is too sad and serious for her age. Of course, the болван blames himself for it. Bucky tried to tell him that it probably has a little more to do with HYDRA experimenting on her for half her life than with a couple weeks in floating superhero prison, but Steve just got quiet and slunk away before he could figure out that the big dumb jerk thought Bucky was talking about himself. “You even ate the Mopane.”

Bucky shrugs. “I’ve had холодец. Not much scares me.”

From her half-amused, half-appalled expression, she knows what that is. “Did HYDRA really feed you that? I thought their best operator would have steak and potatoes every night.”

 _God bless Wanda,_ Bucky thinks, fervently. She’s not Steve, but so far she’s the only person, including Steve, who doesn’t feel a need to tiptoe around his HYDRA past. She’s not scared of him, either, which is refreshing. Clint has apparently been mind-controlled himself, which makes him supportive but wary; Sam’s first loyalty is to Steve, which is most of the reason Bucky likes him, but it means he worries (rightly) about how Bucky’s presence and distance affect Steve’s mental state; and Scott is obviously, hilariously out of his depth in this whole situation. Wanda, though? Wanda _was_ HYDRA. She chose it. She owns it. And if he gets triggered again and she needs to shut him down, he trusts her not to rank his safety above her own, which is one promise Steve will never be able to make.

“It was the Cold War,” he tells her, shrugging. “Food was short and I need five thousand calories a day at baseline, twice that if I’m in combat. Sometimes I think they froze me in between missions just to cut the food bills.”

“My brother was like that, after they changed him. He could eat anything, any time, and never be satisfied.”

“You miss him a lot?” Bucky says, and cringes as soon as the words are out. Dumb fucking question.

“As much as Steve misses you,” she says, and it’s lucky that they reach a market stall right at that moment and she turns to the seller to start a surprisingly intense conversation about the relative merits of one squash over another, because it gives him time to deal with that little  _ouch_ moment.

When she turns back, she’s got two of the squash in her shopping basket, and he takes it from her, even though it makes him walk even more lopsided to carry it right-handed. They’re an ocean and a century away from when he used to walk Becca back from the butcher shop with the roast for Sunday dinner, but not everything has to change.

“So you gonna tell me about this plan of yours?” he asks, when she’s walking beside him again.

“Here?” she says, surprised.

“Best place. Somebody would have to be shadowing us to hear it, and our guard back there would’ve spotted anyone who was. So nobody can listen in here unless they’ve got our clothes bugged, in which case it doesn’t matter where we talk. What?” he says, because she’s frowning.

“Natasha told me that looking over my shoulder would become second nature,” she says. “I didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”

He nods. He’d pat her shoulder, if he had a free hand. “Happened to me a couple months into the Big One,” he says. “I’d tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t. You just get used to it being hard, and you learn how to deal with that.”

“Well, thank you for not lying to me, Bucky Barnes,” she says, and he can tell he’s touched the edge of whatever bitterness she’s carrying around even before she changes the subject. “You know the thing the Vision calls the Mindstone?” she asks, and when he looks at her blankly, she taps a spot in the center of her forehead. “He wears it here.”

“Right. Supposed to be an Infinity Stone or some sh—stuff. What?”

“You know about Infinity Stones?”

“Like I told Steve, I haven’t been living under a rock for the last two years.”

“Well,” she says, “the Vision doesn’t understand it. No one does. But I think that if I had one like it, I could use it to find the codes in your mind. To remove them.”

Bucky’s knees absolutely do not go weak at the thought of yet another person fucking with his brain. “Even if you had something like that,” he says, “are you sure you’d want to go poking around in my head? There’s some pretty harsh stuff in there.”

“Are you afraid to let me?”

“Yes,” Bucky says, honestly. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s that I don’t want anybody in my head except me. But I’ll let you if it means I don’t have to worry about hurting Steve anymore.”

“You love him that much,” Wanda says. It’s not a question; she knows. He wonders if she’s actually read his mind—which she says she can’t do unless she’s actually giving somebody one of those fear-visions of hers, but how would anyone know, really?—or if it’s just that plainly written on his face.

“Yeah, and I’ve almost killed him, what, three, maybe four times now because of all the HYDRA programming I carry around nowadays. It can’t happen again, Wanda.” He can’t live with himself if it happens again, is what he really means. It doesn’t matter how much or how little he physically hurts Steve when the Asset comes out, or how fast his body heals; it’s destroying whatever is left of both their souls, and they can’t keep taking these kinds of losses. “So you need something like the Mindstone. I assume you don’t mean we should kill this Vision character and take his. He did seem like kind of a dick, but that might be a little excessive.”

That actually gets a real laugh out of her, which makes him smile in return. _Score one for Team Stegosaurus._ “No one needs to die for this. The Mindstone was part of Loki’s scepter, when he invaded this world. We know he brought it from space. If there are others like it, they would also come from space.”

“Yeah, well, I hope you’re not planning to search _space,_ ’cause that might take a while.”

She gives him a withering look that’s almost exactly like the one Becca used to give him, eighty-odd years ago. “There is a meteor in a museum. Inside the meteor, they say there is a gem. It’s a story, a legend. A few weeks ago, Stark Industries offered the museum a lot of money for the chance to study this meteor. I think they believe it’s another gem like the Mindstone.”

“Okay,” Bucky says, cautious. There’s an awful lot of _might_ and _maybe_ in this story, but it’s possible that she’s got something up her sleeve he doesn’t know about. “So this mystical stone of potential de-brainwashing, what museum is it in exactly?”

She tells him.

 

Bucky has stormed through a lot of doorways in pursuit of Steve Rogers over the course of his long life: the Barnes and Rogers apartments, school classrooms, movie theaters, diners, bars, recruitment offices, barracks, HYDRA strongholds… Honestly, the sense of stomping around wanting to grab Steve by the throat and shake him until some sense rattles loose is a feeling so intensely familiar that it’s almost soothing.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says, two seconds before Bucky’s right hand seizes the front of his shirt. His right arm isn’t quite strong enough to toss Steve against the wall of the living room, but he’s angry enough to want to.

“What the _hell,_ Steve,” he says, his voice a low growl.

Steve, the bastard, actually has the nerve to look worried. “Bucky,” he says. “Did something happen? Are you okay?”

“Don’t you _fucking_ are-you-okay me, Rogers. Bad enough you want to risk sneaking onto U.S. soil to get some magic rock that might or might not do us any good when you know you could get arrested before you even get through customs, and then I find out you want to rob the Museum of Natural History? It’s right there in fucking Manhattan! It literally takes five minutes to _walk_ there from Stark Tower, Steve, and fucking Stark can fucking _fly!”_

“Wanda told you the plan,” Steve says, and his expression evens out a little, and no, Bucky is not okay with the fact that now the dumb son of a bitch actually looks relieved.

“It’s not a plan! It’s not even part of a plan. It’s like twelve fucking percent of a plan.” Bucky lets go of him so he can rake his right hand through his hair. “Obviously, I’m going with you.”

Well. He’s finally managed to catch Steve off guard. After a couple of little startled noises, he says, “Are you sure?”

“As far as I can tell, your entire strategy right now is ‘steal a priceless treasure from a museum and smuggle it out of the country,’” Bucky points out. “You have any idea what kind of planning is involved in a heist like that? It’s not getting _to_ the target that’s the hard part, it’s getting it out. And the longer it takes to plan, the more chance we get there and find out Stark’s already got his metal mitts on the thing. If we get there and have Wanda check the thing out, there’s a chance she’ll be able to use it on me right then and there, which means we don’t have to figure out how to get it out of the room at all. In fact, it’s probably better if we keep the team to just the two of us. I get Wanda in, she fixes my brain, I get her out and bam, the job’s done.”

Without warning, Steve steps forward and throws his arms around Bucky, who tenses, then forces himself to take a long, slow breath. “You big dumb jerk,” Steve says. “Do you really think I’d let _you_ go without _me?_ This mission isn’t just for you, you know.”

“What do you mean?” Bucky says, and realizes too late that this is a terrible tactical mistake. Now Steve is going to launch into one of those tear-jerking speeches about loyalty and friendship, and he’s not sure he can handle that right now. Not when he’s been such a colossal fuckup lately, not when he should be able to overcome these stupid mental blocks in his head and he can’t, not even enough to lift his _one remaining arm_ and put it around a guy he’s been in love with for most of a century.

“Are you really gonna make me say this out loud? I mean I want to have sex with you, Barnes.”

Bucky says, “What?”

“That is what you want, too, right?”

God, Steve is blushing bright red to the tips of his ears, and Bucky has never loved him more. “Yes, you обожаемый idiot, of course I want to have sex with you. I’ve wanted that since 1932 and trust me, that hasn’t stopped just because cryo is basically the world’s longest cold shower. Did you really think I was gonna change my mind now?”

“Well, you have been kind of avoiding me lately.”

“Only so I won’t hurt you again!”

“I know,” Steve says. “And you know what? In one way, having you with me again _is_ enough. Looking at you from across the room, sleeping in different beds—I’ll do it forever, if that’s what it takes. But it’s not my preference. If we’re going to do this, I want to _do_ this. We’ve both been fighting for other people for most of our lives, Buck, and I’m not sure either of us will ever get to stop. But we deserve one goddamn thing that’s ours, and if we have to steal a priceless treasure from a museum to get it, then I’m willing to take my chances.”

“Steven Grant Rogers,” Bucky says, delighted. “You’re being _selfish._ What would your ma say?”

Steve squares his shoulders and sticks his chin out, and for a second, he’s so much the skinny Brooklyn brat he used to be that Bucky actually laughs out loud. He should have known that eleven weeks or seventy years apart, it makes no difference; fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Steve’s gonna Steve till the day they die. “She’d say, ‘When you find something you love, hold onto it, no matter what.’”

“Okay,” Bucky says. “So I guess we’re both going to Manhattan.”

“Well, not _today,”_ Steve admits. “We’ve still gotta get something done about your arm. I’m not letting you go anywhere until I’m sure you can defend yourself, if it comes to that. And, uh, there is the small issue of finding a way into the country.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, “I think I know a couple people who can help us with that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter concludes the posting of stuff I had written in advance, so updates will go back to their usual completely unpredictable schedule, but hopefully this has built up a little momentum. :)
> 
>  **A note on Wakanda:** My only primary sources on Wakanda are Civil War and the current Black Panther run (which is _so good OMG),_ and I know that the language spoken in Civil War is Xhosa, so South Africa might be the most accurate real-world analogue. However, I know some folks who've been to Botswana and managed to ask some questions without revealing my secret fanfic agenda, so long story short, the foods referenced here are Botswana cuisine.
> 
> (Incidentally, my headcanon is that Wanda had to try Mopane worms to be polite and decided they weren’t actually too bad. However, when she brought some home, Steve and Scott were appalled, while Bucky and Clint immediately got into a worm-eating competition while also trying to outdo each other with stories of things they’ve eaten that were worse. Sam just sat back and enjoyed the show.)
> 
> Don't Google холодец unless you're really ready.


	4. homecoming

Bucky texts Daisy, and for the first time ever, it takes her more than twenty-four hours to respond. It’s lucky that he’s otherwise occupied during most of that time, because if he wasn’t, he’d be going insane with worry. As it is, though, he winds up spending most of it getting fitted for a new arm.

“I have some conditions,” he says, when T’Challa calls them in to look at the prototype. (Steve raises an eyebrow at him in a _beggars can’t be choosers_ expression that tells Bucky he really hasn’t gotten smarter with age; Bucky ignores him.) “First off,” he says, meeting T’Challa’s eyes, “this medical team of yours, I want to meet them ahead of time. I want them to know who they’re doing this for, and if any of them has a problem with it, they get to quit, no questions asked.”

Steve makes a low sound of protest, but Bucky doesn’t care. This is important. When T’Challa nods, thoughtfully, he continues, “Second, I burn through anesthetic pretty fast, and I can’t guarantee I won’t freak out if I wake up on an operating table. So you gotta build restraints that’ll hold me down. Something like that box they had in Bucharest, maybe.”

“Bucky, that thing practically made you catatonic!” Steve says, which is great, because it gives Bucky a second chance to completely ignore him.

“The surgeon wants you to remain conscious during the procedure,” T’Challa says. “She’ll need you awake to test your control of the arm.”

The flicker of memory that comes back to him—waking up with the first metal arm and instinctively latching it around a HYDRA scientist’s throat—makes Bucky take a deep breath and steady himself against the table, but he nods in reluctant agreement. “A sedative, then. Something that’ll make me, uh, docile. And they should be ready to use the shutdown code at the first sign of trouble.”

“And what else?” T’Challa asks, over an assortment of angry noises from Steve.

“You gotta let me pay you back for this somehow,” Bucky says. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the kindness, but you’re doing too much for me already. And _you_ can shut your damn mouth,” he tells Steve, who looks ready to explode. “You don’t get to give me any guff about this, not after you spent the better part of two decades refusing to let anybody help you because you were too proud to take charity.”

“The scans of your old arm, the ones taken by your friend, will be used to create new prosthetics for Wakandan citizens,” T’Challa says, ignoring the byplay. “And the knowledge my surgeons will gain from attaching this new arm to you will benefit many of my people, as well.”

“Sure,” Bucky says, “that’s a start. But also, I, Bucky Barnes, personally owe you, the king of Wakanda, a favor, okay? And you know I have, let’s say, a special set of abilities you can call on any time you need them.”

“You do _not_ have to do that, Buck,” Steve says.

“Jesus, Steve, I thought you of all people would understand my wanting to work for the good guys, for a change,” Bucky tells him, and after that, Steve is miraculously quiet for a while, so he guesses he’s given him something to think about.

He’s sorrier now than ever that he didn’t go back to Steve right after D.C., even if that would’ve meant never getting to pet a baby stegosaurus. Without Bucky to serve as his perpetual reality check, Steve has gotten worse than he could have predicted. That’s exactly why it’s so important to get his head fixed, so he never has to leave the big dumb солнышка to his own devices again.

The surgical team settles on a fancy designer drug that leaves Bucky responsive but pliable, and the procedure goes shockingly well. During surgical prep, they let him distract himself with headphones and the Wakandan equivalent of Animal Planet; the part where they cut away the broken wires and charred edges of the old arm casing gets a little hairy, and he resorts to his mantra of _James-Barnes-Sergeant-32557038_ for a little while, but he manages to give them a truthful _no_ when they ask if he wants to stop. He feels it the moment the new arm hums to life, and holy shit, it works like a _dream._ “Is there vibranium in this?” he asks, hefting it up and staring at it as soon as the restraining bars retract.

“It’s an alloy,” the lead engineer tells him. “Vibranium and steel, like the Captain’s shield was.”

“Huh.” He can identify where the old plates stop and the new plates start, but probably no one else will be able to tell the difference—and hell, it’s not as if it’s there for cosmetic purposes, anyway. It’s definitely lighter than the old arm, and it feels just as strong, but better balanced. He grants himself exactly five seconds to imagine putting his shiny new fist through Tony Stark’s smug face before he forces himself back to reality and says, “It’s great,” and they release him from the surgical center with instructions to test it out for a few days and come back for any necessary adjustments.

One broken piece of Bucky Barnes repaired; one to go.

He’s giving the arm a field test by chopping up vegetables in the kitchen—Wanda is coming over later to teach him to make seswaa, a dish that feels surprisingly homelike for something that originated this far from Brooklyn—when his phone finally dings with Daisy’s response, and he dives for it, the fingers of his new left hand curling around it almost naturally. **B.B.!!! I missed you,** the first text says, and the second says, **Yeah I can get u in. Leave everything to me.** The third text says, **R U w/ Steve?**

 **He’s not here right now but we’re together,** he types, and then, after a small pause and a deep breath, he adds, **In both senses if that’s what ur asking. But we’re taking it slow so don’t get too excited yet.**

Her response is an incomprehensible string of emojis, mainly assorted hearts and kissy faces. It’s one of those moments when it hits Bucky all over again how crazy the future is—he’s not only allowed to be openly in love with Steve, but he can even tell people and have them be happy for him. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it’s more than he could’ve imagined in 1943. More than he deserves, maybe, but he’ll take it.

He’s still blinking a little when the front door opens. They haven’t talked about where Steve goes when he’s not around, or why he keeps coming back with cuts and bruises and once, something suspiciously like a chemical burn, although he tugged his sleeve down to cover that one the moment he caught Bucky looking. Bucky is leaving it alone for the moment, but he hopes it’s clear that this solitary hero bullshit ends the second he’s medically fit to cover Steve’s six. “Hey,” Steve says, and when Bucky turns toward him, his eyes widen and he crosses the kitchen in two quick steps, stopping just short of throwing his arms around Bucky. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m cutting onions,” Bucky says, rubbing his eyes. “Leave it to you to look at my face before you notice that I have a whole new arm, punk.”

Steve sees it then, and gapes at it. “That was today? Buck, you should’ve told me! I would’ve been there.”

Right, because knowing Steve was fussing around a waiting room away wouldn’t have raised his own stress level even further. “Surprise,” he says, as nonchalantly as he can manage. “Ask me if it hurt.”

“Did it hurt?”

“A little. Ask me if it’s permanent.”

“Is it perman—” When Steve catches on, he laughs like it’s the best joke in the world, even though it’s clearly among the worst. “I didn’t think you remembered that two minutes after I pulled you off that table,” he says, and then, “I guess I couldn’t, um…”

It’s been a good day. Bucky is willing to risk it. He pushes the knife out of reach and holds out both of his arms, and Steve wraps him up in a tight hug—just for a minute, until the plates in the new arm start to click together. Then he pulls back before Steve can notice his pounding heart and one sweating palm. “I heard from Daisy,” he says. “She’s in.”

“Daisy? Who’s—wait a minute, your super-secret spy world contact is named Daisy?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, grinning, “and I can’t wait for you to see what she can do.”

 

It’s a shame to be leaving Wakanda without seeing more of it. HYDRA never got a foothold here—he wonders sometimes if it’s the only place in the world where they didn’t—so it feels safe, but besides that, it’s more beautiful than Bucky ever could’ve imagined, pristine modern cities packed with bright sunlight and green spaces dotting an open countryside full of waterfalls and wildlife. Under better circumstances, he would’ve dragged Steve all over the place, making him draw things, the way they never got to do in the old days.

Well, maybe someday. But for now, as usual, there’s a job to do.

The plan is this: him and Steve and the rest of them—Clint has started referring to them collectively as Team Cap, a habit Bucky’s picked up mostly because it makes Sam roll his eyes—will get on a private jet in Birnin Zana, along with a handful of legitimate diplomats on their way to the shiny new Wakandan embassy. When the flight lands at JFK, Daisy will create a diversion to let them sneak out of the airport unnoticed. She’ll take them to a disused SHIELD safe house—there are a lot of those around these days if you know where to look, which she does—and there, they’ll develop a strategy to get into the museum itself.

“What kind of diversion?” Sam demands, when Bucky outlines the plan for them.

“I didn’t ask, but my friend says she’s got it handled.”

“And this friend,” Sam presses. “You really believe she can get six internationally wanted criminals in and out of the busiest airport in the country undetected?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Best way to do it. They’ll never expect us to try something this stupid.”

They all look sideways at Steve at that point, waiting for him to put a stop to the madness, but he doesn’t, so they’re stuck with it. Bucky can’t actually blame any of them for being concerned, considering that this whole plan is only necessary because large parts of his brain are still a train wreck, but he does wish they’d at least acknowledge that _Steve’s_ brilliant plans usually consist of kicking down doors and punching stuff until either it falls down or he does.

It’s a nice flight. Long, but the plane is roomy enough that he can stretch his legs out, and the diplomatic staff are coolly polite, except for the intern, who teaches Bucky some mild curse words in Wakandan in exchange for some really choice ones in Russian. Steve looks at him with vague disappointment, even though he knows full damn well that Bucky has been immune to guilt on his linguistic choices since 1928.

Then the plane lands, and despite the fact that it’s nearly 10 P.M. New York time, several American diplomats are there to greet the Wakandans, along with a whole bunch of intense-looking security guys in dark suits that don’t hide the shapes of their weapons at all.

“This would be a real good time for your buddy to make her move, Barnes,” Clint murmurs, peering out the window of the jet.

“Get away from the window, Clint,” Steve says quietly. “They have no reason to suspect anything unless we draw their attention.”

“Yeah? Well, tell that to the one who’s walking toward the plane right now.”

“Shit!” Bucky does his own quick peek through the one-way glass and sees that Clint is right: one of the guards is casually strolling toward the plane. _Shit, shit, shit._ “We didn’t do anything to tip them,” he says, mostly to himself. “They probably check all the incoming planes. Daisy’ll know that and have it covered.”

“We’re trusting our lives to somebody named Daisy?” says Scott.

“Yes, Daisy! Honestly, would you be happier if I’d told you my spy friend was named Sergei or Alexei or something?” Bucky snaps.

“I would,” says Clint. “I _know_ that Russian spies know their shit.”

“All of you, shush,” Steve says abruptly. “Okay, if we have to fight our way out of this, then, Wanda, I want you to—”

That’s when the ground shakes and all the lights go out.

It’s a very mild earthquake, hardly more than a rattle, and Bucky suspects they’ll find out later that it’s extremely localized—like ten yards square localized—but something has killed all the lights inside the hangar, the floodlights illuminating the private runway, and the spotlights by the doors. Somebody turns on the headlights of one of the long black towncars that’s parked nearby, and the security guys are busy enough trying to radio into their headquarters and simultaneously hustle the Wakandans into the waiting cars that they forget all about the jet. The others are all watching the chaos out on the runway, which is why Bucky is the only one who stays focused on the door of the jet, and even if he wasn’t, he’s not sure even Clint’s eagle eyes could pick out the shadow that appears in the opening. Then someone presses a pair of night-vision goggles into his hand and says, “Hey, B.B.”

Bucky shoves the goggles on quickly, so he can see well enough to sweep her into a hug. “Daisy,” he says, pressing his cheek against the wool cap pulled over her hair and his hands against the back panel of her dark leather jacket. “God, it’s good to be home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Grumble. I mean, okay, I really think the Russos made the right story choices in how they ended Civil War, but I can't help selfishly feeling that it's a real pain in the ass for the fanfic writers who need Bucky to have his damn metal arm back for reasons.
> 
> Anyway, hallelujah, the unnecessarily long setup is done, and in the next chapter, I can finally get to the actual story.


	5. furnace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I accidentally a heist.

“So did you two meet at a Goth convention or what?” Sam asks, looking back and forth between Bucky and Daisy.

“Shut up, Bird Costume,” Bucky says, but Daisy’s mouth is twitching, and dammit, Bucky can’t keep up his glower while Sam is making Daisy smile. He doesn’t know what the poor kid has been through over the past couple months, but if her wardrobe reflects how she’s feeling, then she’s been in a dark place lately. Christ, he hopes she hasn’t modeled her new look on him. The black leather jacket, gloves, and boots are almost practical, but he could’ve told her nobody needs that much eyeliner. He promises himself that before this is over, they’ll go out for milkshakes—well, not _out_ out, seeing as both of them are currently on the terrorist watchlist, but that’s why God invented the drive-through—and _talk._

Steve sees him watching Daisy, and raises an eyebrow. Bucky shrugs, taps his chest, and tips his head toward Wanda, and sees Steve’s expression soften as he understands. Funny, how seventy years apart haven’t impaired their ability to have whole conversations without saying a word.

Because the safe house still belongs to SHIELD, even though Daisy says she doesn’t anymore, there’s a holotable, and Daisy has plugged a little USB thingy into it and pulled up a set of building plans. “So here’s the museum,” she says, as if any of them wouldn’t recognize the building. The former Avengers used to live five minutes from it, but Bucky’s sharp sense of déjà vu comes from dragging Steve there to look at dinosaur bones all the time when they were kids. He wonders if those memories are kicking Steve in the head right now, too. “Visitor entrances are here, here, and here. Staff access is here, here, here, and here. Cameras—” She taps her keyboard, and the structure lights up with little red dots. “Pretty much everywhere.”

Clint whistles softly and Bucky is pretty sure Sam swears under his breath, but to his surprise, Scott leans forward, not dismayed, only interested. “Are these steel doors?” he asks, pointing.

“Yeah, they’ll come down in less than three seconds if anybody triggers an alarm in that part of the building. Truth is, they’re less worried about someone getting in—”

“—Than about something getting out,” Scott finishes. “I bet the individual cases are alarmed, too. Pressure sensors, maybe? I could get out if the doors came down, but not with the meteorite.”

“We’re not asking you to, Scott.” Steve puts a hand on the guy’s shoulder. It’s oddly reminiscent of how he used to interact with the Howling Commandos, and Bucky fights down a sudden flare of jealousy—he’s the one who told Steve not to touch him anymore, and with good reason. “The best way is still to get Bucky and Wanda into the room. But once you’re inside the building—”

“You can get me access to the security cameras,” Daisy says. “And I can put them on a loop. Then the rest of you can spend as much time inside as you need to, and no one will ever know you were there.”

“What about guards?” Sam asks.

“That’s the crazy part. The alarm system is so completely automated that they literally have _one_ guard,” Daisy tells them. “Well, they call him the head of security, but he’s it. And he’s not even technically supposed to be in the museum itself, just the security office.”

“Are you sure?” Sam says, skeptical. “Sounds like a trap to me.”

“More like a closely guarded secret,” Daisy says. “I’ve been over the museum’s operating budget with a fine-toothed comb. The museum closes at five, the cleaning crew is out by eight, and after that, there’s one guy who has keycard access until dawn. If Scott can knock him out, then literally the only person we have to worry about until six A.M. is out of the picture.”

“Can you disable the alarm on the case with the meteorite?” Bucky asks.

Daisy grins. “Already done.”

“What? How?”

“The display cases don’t have pressure sensors,” Daisy says, “they have _vibration_ sensors. Great for setting off an alarm if anyone tries to drill into the glass or up through the base. Not so great at knowing the difference between a drill and an earthquake. I’ve been setting off false alarms all over the museum for the last couple of days. They have no idea what’s going on, so the whole system is currently down for repairs.”

“Дрожька, you’re a gift,” Bucky says, sincerely.

She shrugs. “Didn’t ask for the powers, but as long as I got ’em…”

“So Clint, Sam, and Scott will take up a position on the roof of a neighboring building. Clint will stay there as our lookout, and when he gives the all-clear, Sam will fly Scott over to the museum roof,” Steve says, in a tone that immediately puts Bucky’s back up. This is Steve’s _don’t worry about a thing, guys, this plan is going to go great_ voice. If there’s a surer indicator of impending disaster, Bucky doesn’t know it. “Scott, you can use the elevator shaft _here_ to get down to the security offices and knock out the head of security. Daisy, you’ll loop the cameras and disable any cameras or alarms right _here,_ which is where Bucky, Wanda, and I will go in.”

“Through the subway entrance?” Bucky is aware that the plates in his arm are starting to clank; he stills them with a conscious effort. “Not sure a subway car’s the best place for three wanted criminals, Steve.”

“We’re not riding the subway,” Steve says. “There’s an access tunnel we can follow that will take us right to the platform, and from there, it’s just up a staircase. You okay with that?”

Bucky’s not so sure he is, considering that both trains and dark, enclosed spaces make him want to run the other way, and with good reason. But he nods, because for Steve—for _him and Steve_ —he’ll at least give it a try.

“And from there—” Steve traces a path through the hologram, from the subway station entrance up a staircase and across the ground level to their destination, which Daisy has marked with a bright red star, because she thinks she’s funny. “We go to the Ross Hall of Meteorites. Bucky will open the case, and then it’s all down to you, Wanda. If you can, you’ll use the gem on site to destroy the Winter Soldier programming. If you can’t, and we have to take it with us—”

“You mean steal it,” Sam says.

“We’re not stealing, we’re borrowing. We’ll give it back. Anyway, the meteorite will be heavy, but it’s small enough for Bucky or me to lift, so we’ll take it and exit back the way we came. Sound good?”

“Yeah, great plan, punk, except for the part where everything goes sideways and we’re all fucked,” Bucky says.

The entire group turns around and stares at him, except for Steve, who frowns at the hologram. “Where do you see a hole?”

“Where _don’t_ I? This mess is more holes than plan. God, it’s 1943 all over again. Everybody can see how crazy it is, but nobody’s got the guts to tell you so. Come on,” he says, looking around at the others. “Tell me _one_ of you doesn’t see it.”

There’s a long pause, and then Clint says, “One guard for the whole museum does seem pretty damn unlikely, Cap. They might have another layer of security that didn’t make it onto these plans. No offense to Daisy here, but I’d be happier if we did live surveillance for a couple nights.”

“We don’t have a couple nights,” Steve says. “Every minute we’re stateside is a risk. We’ll go over the files again, though, make sure we haven’t missed anything. Anything else?”

“Just out of curiosity,” Sam says, “what happens if those steel doors does come down with you three on the wrong side? ’Cause I don’t think even Barnes can punch his way through that.”

“Wanda, can you open one of those?” Steve asks.

Wanda squints at the plans. “Depends on how heavy they are.”

“I can get the system override codes for the doors,” Daisy says. “The only problem would be if they’re set up to cut power when—wait.” She bends her head over her laptop again.

“Okay, we’ll work on a backup plan for the doors. Anything else, Buck?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, patting Steve on the arm. “But nothing a smart guy like you can’t figure out. I’m gonna make some food, I’m starving.”

He’s checking out the pantry when he hears footsteps behind him. “Hey, Wanda,” he says, without looking up from the canned goods he’s poking through. He and Steve have made do with a lot of terrible rations over the years, but considering they’ve got to feed seven people, two of them super-soldiers, he wants to at least make an effort.

“You didn’t see any flaws in that plan at all, did you?” Wanda asks.

“Nope,” Bucky says, squinting at one of the glass jars. “Wow, SHIELD really stocked this place up to withstand a siege. Hey, do you know what capers are? ’Cause I don’t, and they kind of scare me.”

“If the plan was good, then why were you giving him a hard time?” she asks, picking up the jar and looking at it.

“Because Steve’s a great tactician right up until his heart gets in the way of his head,” Bucky says. “And because I know people don’t like to argue with Captain America, but sometimes the best way to protect him is to give him a good swift kick when he needs it. And because having good people end up in floating superhero jail for my sake was bad enough the first time, and I’m not asking anybody to go through that again just to save my sorry ass.”

Wanda doesn’t answer him, not directly. But she does set the jar down and put her arms around him. It startles him a little. She’s never touched him yet that he can remember, and he knows he should warn her off, but apparently Steve’s not the only dummy whose heart is running the show. Then she pulls away and goes back to the canned goods, and neither of them mentions it again.

Two hours later, Steve calls him back to the holotable. He and Daisy have built half a dozen back doors into the plan, as well as escape routes from every room in case they have to abort the mission, and in the morning, Clint will go out and obtain (his expression absolutely dares Bucky to make a crack about borrowing) stun guns for all of them, in case there are any surprise guards who aren’t on the official roster. “Happy now?” he asks, grimly.

“It’s still a stupid plan,” Bucky grumbles, mostly on principle. Actually, he’s pretty happy about those escape routes. Then he says, “Hey, Steve? I love you, you know.”

Steve blinks. “Where’d that come from?”

“I dunno, I just… if anything goes wrong—”

“Nothing will go wrong,” Steve says. “We’ve infiltrated plenty of HYDRA bases and taken their stuff with less intel and less backup. Buck, why are you nervous about this?”

“About breaking into a museum that’s built like a fortress and stealing some magical shit? Question kind of answers itself, Steve-o.”

“Right. Because you’ve never done anything like this before.”

Bucky could argue that _he_ hasn’t, the Asset has, but it would be splitting hairs and they’d both know it. “Maybe I’m not worried about it going wrong,” he admits. “Maybe I’m worried it’ll go right.”

“You’re nervous about letting Wanda into your mind?”

“No. I mean, yes, but… it’s just that, if she gets the HYDRA codes out of my head, then this time tomorrow we could be, you know…” It’s terrible of him, but he can’t resist. “Fonduing.”

Well, if nothing else, now he’s got confirmation that Steve _is_ going to turn beet red every time this subject comes up. “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”

“Nope. But whether I keep it between us or tell Sam is entirely up to you.”

That gets a laugh out of Steve, although it’s a slightly edgy one. “Okay, fine. So what’s the problem? Don’t tell me it’s your first time since 1944.”

“Why? Is it yours?”

“We’re not talking about me,” Steve says, _way_ too quickly, and Bucky would smile if this wasn’t actually legitimately terrifying.

“It’s just… Whatever happens, you and me are still good, right?”

Steve looks at him for a long moment, and then he laughs so hard that Bucky has to fight down a seventy-year-old fear that he’s going to give himself an asthma attack. “Buck, please say you’re not afraid I won’t care about you anymore if this dating thing doesn’t work out. Because I think that ship _kind_ of sailed when you shot me on the helicarrier, buddy.”

“Steve, that’s not funny.”

“What, you’re the only one who’s allowed to have gallows humor now?”

“Yes, actually!” Bucky says, but only because he has no idea how to get it across to Steve that he couldn’t be further from the whole fucking point. No, he’s not worried that they’re not going to be compatible in bed or something (or he _wasn’t,_ anyway, and thanks a lot, brain), but he can’t tell Steve that what’s really eating him is a nagging fear that getting the HYDRA programming out of his head won’t be enough.

HYDRA might have been the ones who broke him, sure. But the stress fractures were there from the first time the 107th went up against the Nazis. From the first time he looked a man in the eyes and then put a bullet between them, not because he was evil, but because when it comes down to a choice of living or dying, Bucky will always choose to live. Darkness isn’t all there is to Bucky Barnes, no. But the darkness is there. God, Tony Stark, who’s been the bad guy in all this, once flew a nuclear warhead through an alien wormhole to save Manhattan. How the hell is Bucky supposed to look at Steve Rogers, the guy who jumped on a grenade in training camp without a second fucking _thought,_ and get him to understand that HYDRA was only able to break him because he was already broken?

But in the end, he doesn’t say anything, because really, saying it isn’t going to make any difference. There’s no power on earth that’s going to prevent Steve Rogers from taking him to that museum.

 

Tunnels aren’t good, but Bucky is okay in them.

Really. He’s not flashing back to a dozen different Soviet bunkers, at all. It’s just that he hasn’t _quite_ worked all the bugs out of this new arm yet, so the plates are clanking around a little more than they’re supposed to. That’s all it is.

Steve’s not exactly buying this story, but Steve can shove it. They’ve got work to do.

“Are you ready, Daisy?” Steve says quietly into his comm.

“Yeah, Ca—Steve.” Daisy is clearly still fangirling a little, and Bucky tries to focus on the perpetual absurdity of people being gaga over Steve rather than the fact that he’s standing in a tight space behind a steel door with two other people way too close to him. “Scott’s on the lower level, and I’m ready to loop the cameras as soon as he gives the word.”

“Clint? Everything all right outdoors?”

“Affirmative,” Clint says. “All quiet.”

“Good. Daisy, let us know when Scott makes contact.”

There’s a crackle on the line. Bucky has already come to recognize that sound: it’s Scott’s suit expanding back to normal size. “Uh, Cap, we might have a little problem here,” he says, and Bucky clenches his left hand into a fist when he hears the nerves bleeding into his voice. “I can’t subdue Daley because Daley’s not in the security office.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and Bucky stifles a groan, because now he’s doing his _this is not unexpected and we can deal with it_ voice, which isn’t much better than his _don’t worry, we got this_ voice. “I’m sure he’ll be back. Daisy, try to trace his access badge, would you? And don’t call me Cap. That’s not who I am anymore.”

“How do you know he meant Captain America?” Sam says dryly. “Maybe from here on out we oughta call you Captain Jack Sparrow. Seems to be a similar element of dumb luck involved.”

“Captain Awesome!” Daisy suggests.

“More like Captain Obvious,” Bucky snorts.

“Captain Nemo,” Wanda says, and Bucky, impressed by how much that kind of fits their situation right now, makes a mental note to compare reading lists later.

“How about Captain Underpants?” After a few seconds of startled silence on the comms, Clint says, “What? I got kids.”

“Daley is in the Hall of Primates on the fourth floor,” Daisy reports, bringing them all back to reality. “He’s probably locking up for the night. I’ll let you know if he swipes his badge anywhere else, but for now, you should be safe.”

“We’re going now,” says Steve. “Daisy, loop the station cameras now. Bucky, Wanda, follow me,” and he shoves open the access door.

The 81st Street subway station is deserted in the aftermath of rush hour, and God, is it good to be out of the darkness and stale, reeking air of the access tunnel, but Bucky still doesn’t let out the breath he’s holding until they’re off the platform and up the stairs that lead to the museum. The heavy glass-and-metal doors are locked, of course, but Wanda waves her hands around with an expression of concentration, and that weird red glow happens, and Bucky hears the clunk of chains rattling and deadbolts sliding open. Now that’s a nice trick.

Steve takes point, and Bucky waits for Wanda to follow before he brings up the rear. He’s got a gun on his right hip and four knives in his belt and thigh holsters _(only_ four, because _someone_ is a killjoy who keeps saying things like _two knives should be enough for anybody, Buck_ and _seriously, I’m a little concerned about the knife thing, Buck),_ and he doesn’t draw any of them yet, but he catches himself patting them for reassurance as Steve leads them through an empty lobby and toward a second staircase. “Daisy, can I get a check on the guard’s location?”

“Still on the fourth floor, boss,” Daisy says—Bucky guesses that’s her solution to _Cap_ being verboten and _Steve_ still being too informal for Steven Grant Rogers, former Avenger. “Just head on up the stairs and take a left through the Hall of Biodiversity. Then you should be clear all the way to the meteorite.”

“Great. Thanks.” Steve glances over at Bucky, then presses the mute button on his comm. “Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah.” Bucky tries to force his shoulders to relax, but of course, it’s too late; Steve has already seen that he’s turning into a bundle of nerves. Bucky sees his hand twitch; he’s obviously making a conscious effort not to put it on Bucky’s shoulder, in the same way Bucky is absolutely refusing to let his left arm do the shifty-plates thing right now.

“Buck, I know you have good instincts for trouble,” Steve says, meeting his eyes. “If something doesn’t feel right here, tell me.”

Bucky shakes his head. The version of him Steve knew _did_ have good instincts for trouble—and HYDRA honed those instincts even further, until the Asset could move through the world like a ghost, avoiding threats until it was time to _be_ the threat. But nowadays, his instincts are always pinging; he’s lived on high alert for so long that he doesn’t know how to stop. So yeah, his gut is telling him there’s danger here, but of course there’s danger; they’re fugitives robbing a public institution five minutes away from the home of a guy who builds weapons for a living and recently made a genuine attempt to kill at least two of them. Of _course_ it’s dangerous and stupid to be here. “It’s fine,” he says.

And it is. It’s fine. For about twenty more seconds. Which is when they come out of the stairwell and standing in between them and their destination is a fucking _bear._

 

So the good news is that Bucky’s body reacts before his brain completely clocks what’s happening. The bad news is that Bucky’s automatic reactions are really fucking stupid.

Standing in the open hallway, Wanda is frozen for a matter of two, maybe three seconds before she raises her hands to defend herself. But in those seconds, Bucky is already moving, jumping in front of her and bringing the new metal arm up. There’s no conscious thought to it whatsoever; it’s a pure muscle memory, an instinct that even predates when he met Steve. This has been in his bones since he had to look out for Becca and Lizzie when they first moved to Brooklyn, putting his own little body between them and carriages, or cars, or trolleys, or just careless adults who weren’t watching where they were going. If he had another second to think, he would’ve realized that this is some of the stupidest shit he’s ever _heard_ of, much less done, but he doesn’t, so he just brings his brand new vibranium-alloy fist up and throws the hardest punch he’s got.

And then Steve grabs him by his other arm and drags him back, while the bear stands up on its back paws and _roars,_ and Bucky’s higher brain functions kick in and he runs like hell, back into the stairwell and up the next flight. The stairs dump them out into the rotunda just inside the main entrance, and Wanda dives for cover behind one of the big half-circle desks where they sell tickets; Bucky drops to the ground beside her and Steve slides in behind both of them, all three of them panting.

“Steve! What the hell is going on in there?” Sam demands over the comms.

“Это медведь в музее,” Bucky manages to gasp. “это проклятый медведь в музее.”

“I don’t speak Russian!” Barton yells, in the tone of somebody who says that a lot.

For once, Steve doesn’t need to wait for a translation. “There is a _goddamn bear_ in the _goddamn museum,_ Barton!” he says.

There’s a moment of stunned silence all around before Sam says, “What the _fuck,_ you guys.”

Bucky can’t even help it. He starts to laugh, high and slightly hysterical. “There’s a bear,” he repeats, “there’s a goddamn fucking—what kind was that, Steve? Grizzly?”

“How the hell would I know? I’m from Brooklyn, same as you!” Steve leans out around the desk, and apparently the bear hasn’t followed them, because he stands up and walks back to the staircase. So, either the bear can’t navigate stairs—unlikely, Bucky thinks, given the size of the thing—or it’s decided they’re not worth the trouble, because Bucky is under no illusions that he actually hurt the thing. “Wanda,” Steve says, coming back to the desk and offering her his hand, “can you… sense where that thing is?”

“No.” Wanda shakes her head, not a negative, but like she’s trying to clear it. “I can’t feel it at all.”

“Okay,” Daisy’s voice cuts in, “you guys are either epically trolling the rest of us or something really weird is going on, because nobody just turns an animal loose in a museum. Are you sure it was really a bear? I mean, a real bear, not like… like mind control, or a projection, or something?”

“Um, I punched that thing, Дрожька,” Bucky says, “and if this is a holodeck situation, I gotta say, it’s got some pretty fucking amazing special effects going on.”

“Did Barnes just make a Star Trek reference?” Sam says, as if he thinks Bucky has managed to live in the future for two years now without ever seeing a TV.

“It wasn’t mind control,” says Wanda. “It was really there. But it didn’t feel as _alive_ as it should have. I know that doesn’t make any sense. It was like Ultron, but not _cold_ like Ultron. It sounds crazy, but…”

“Crazier than a bear running loose in a museum?” Bucky points out, and she almost manages a smile.

“Okay,” Steve says, squaring his shoulders, clearly making a decision that he’s going to face this head-on and get his team through it. It’s an expression Bucky has seen on him too many times; the last time he saw it, he thinks, might’ve been in a HYDRA science base in Austria right after a dozen cocoon-like things broke open and spilled out a bunch of grim experimental creatures that the Commandos spent the next two hours putting down. “Okay, so we obviously can’t go back the way we came. Daisy, is there an alternate route we can take to get to the Hall of Meteorites from this floor?”

“You’re not aborting the mission?” Clint says, in disbelief. “I’m sorry, did I not hear you correctly about the _bear?”_

“I don’t understand what’s going on, but we’ve come this far, and it obviously isn’t hostile enough to pursue us,” Steve says, as if this is a completely reasonable course of action. “Whatever is happening here, if we can avoid it and get to the Hall, we can still carry out the mission. We’ll just have to lock the doors while Wanda works so nothing can get in, and if the bear shows up, we’ll need a little help getting out.”

“Speaking of that bear, I’ve got a theory,” Bucky says. “Okay, keep in mind that I have literal brain damage, so it wouldn’t be nice to make fun of me, but Scott, you still haven’t found Daley, have you?”

“Uhhh, Barnes, are you suggesting that Daley turned into a bear and came after you?” Scott asks.

“Look, all I’m saying is, you spend a couple winters in Siberia, listen to some of the folk stories they tell there, and were-bears don’t sound all that unreasonable anymore.”

“There are some Inhumans who can do pretty weird things,” Daisy notes. “Okay, so you’re where now? Oh, never mind, I’ve got you on tracking. You’re in the rotunda right next to the T. Rex statue, right?”

Bucky, Steve, and Wanda all swivel their eyes toward the pedestal in the middle of the room.

The empty pedestal.

“Yeah, that dinosaur skeleton must’ve been moved, Daisy,” Steve says, which is a completely reasonable explanation that does nothing to halt the creeping feeling of dread that’s currently taking over Bucky’s entire body. “There are no fossils in here.”

“What? It was there when I went in the other day!” Daisy says. “They don’t just move that thing around on a whim, either. It weighs a ton. Literally.”

Steve is still facing the pedestal, but Bucky happens to be looking straight at Wanda when her eyes suddenly go wide, fixed on a point just behind him. She brings her hand up to her mouth and swears very softly in Sokovian. Or at least, Bucky assumes that’s a swear. He can feel his own heartbeat starting to speed up in response, but suddenly, he feels like he’s in a nightmare where everything is moving too slowly, like it’s all trapped in sticky molasses. Because he’s just thought of another explanation for the bear downstairs, and it’s impossible, and it’s crazy, but this place is starting to feel like it runs on the same anti-logic as one of those dreams. And Wanda keeps staring and says, “Steve,” and—Bucky has never seen Wanda actually afraid before; even facing a bear, that was surprise that rooted her to the spot, not fear. But she looks scared now, and Steve turns and follows her eyes and the color drains from his face completely, and that’s when Bucky knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Tyrannosaurus Rex is standing behind him. Somehow, through some kind of fucked-up Toy Story shit, things in the museum are coming to life, and one of those things is the T. Rex, and this is how he’s going to die, the fate he thought he escaped last year finally catching up to him, he’s going to turn around and then the fucking dinosaur skeleton is going to be alive and it is going to tear him into pieces.

Then a very human voice says, “Okay, asshole, put your hands up, slowly,” and Bucky freezes for a completely different reason, because he knows that voice.

He puts his hands up, slowly, and turns around, and finds himself looking into the faces of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.

The way they looked seventy-three years ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I just have Bucky punch a bear? Why, yes. Yes, I did just have Bucky punch a bear.


	6. benign

“Well, this is fuckin’ weird,” says the guy who’s masquerading as Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes in 1943. It’s a good likeness, but Bucky is pretty sure he was _never_ that young. Kid’s got a fresh little baby face that makes him look about twelve years old, Jesus. Still, he’s got the same dark, slightly disheveled hair that Bucky used to style with Brylcreem, same jaw that Bucky used to scrape carefully every morning with a straight razor, same uniform with the triple chevron on the shoulder. It’s not _his_ uniform, because that got destroyed in the HYDRA prison and replaced with the decidedly nonstandard blue jacket, but it’s a real World War II uniform, not a modern replica; it’s just slightly creased and worn in all the right places. The dog tags are definitely replicas, because his were on him when he fell from the train. The rifle is real, though, and the way the kid has it leveled at his face is so _him_ that it makes his head spin.

“Bucky?” Speaking of replicas, the tiny copy of Steve Rogers, also circa the earlier part of 1943, takes half a step forward, mouth falling open in disbelief. And Bucky would swear on a stack of Bibles that it _is_ Steve: blonde hair flopping in his eyes, civvie clothes hanging loose on his bony shoulders (they were always Bucky’s clothes first back then, thrown at him, sometimes literally, when Bucky got new ones, and somehow never quite altered down _enough),_ the little hunch in his shoulders like he never stops waiting for the world to land another blow on his crooked back. There’s absolutely no doubt in Bucky’s mind that it’s him, even though the evidence that it can’t be is six-foot-two and three feet away. “My God, you’re really him. I thought you were dead.”

“I thought you were taller,” Bucky blurts, because apparently his mouth has completely disconnected from his brain. “Steve, you need to make up your mind, are you little or big?”

“Why is your arm made of metal?” the fake Bucky demands. “You some kind of robot or something?”

“This is crazy,” says the real Steve. “This is some kind of trick, or maybe it’s a—”

Bucky never gets to hear what Steve thinks it might be, because just then, a red flash of Wanda’s magic blasts both of the damn kids across the room.

Bucky moves, because no matter what’s going on here, one thing is a definite: this kid pointed a gun at him and _his_ Steve, and that doesn’t get to stand. He snatches up the gun in his metal hand. It’s a Springfield, exactly like the one the one they took away from him the first time he was captured by HYDRA, and the way the butt of it settles against his right shoulder does more to convince him that he’s not drugged or dreaming than anything else so far. “I don’t know what kind of weird shit is going on here,” he says, pointing the rifle right between Fake Bucky’s eyes, “but you little assholes better make with some fuckin’ answers, you get me?”

The kids are both on the floor, sprawled where they fell, and then, all of a sudden, the tiny version of Steve breaks into a wide, crooked grin that almost cuts off Bucky’s oxygen supply, because that right there is the Steve he fell in love with. “Well, that’s you, all right,” he says, getting up and offering a hand to Fake Bucky.

“Stay down!” Bucky snaps.

Tiny Steve gives him a meaningful look. “Yeah, ’cause you’re really gonna shoot me,” he says dryly, and Fake Bucky, looking wary, grips his hand and pretends to let Tiny Steve help him up.

“Okay, what the actual fuck is going on in there?” Clint demands, over the comms, which is basically the same question that’s stuck on a loop in Bucky’s head. “Wanda, please tell me Barnes and Rogers haven’t both fallen into some kind of freaky amnesia trap or something.”

The real Steve Rogers frowns. “Daisy,” he says, “do you have any way to send a video feed of this room to everybody’s phone? I think it’ll be quicker than trying to explain.”

“Gimme a sec, I’m outputting to a secure feed so the museum office still sees a nice empty lobby. …Okay, I got it.” There’s a pause, and Daisy says, “Damn, B.B. You clean up good when you’re, I dunno, time traveling from the Forties or something.”

 _“Answers,”_ Bucky repeats, through clenched teeth. “Now.”

Tiny Steve sighs. “We should tell them, Buck,” he says, and the easy way the name rolls off his tongue leaves even less doubt in his mind that if this skinny piece of work isn’t a clone of the original Steve Rogers, he’s close enough for horseshoes or hand grenades… which he would probably jump on.

“You think they’re really us?” Fake Bucky says quietly, and Bucky’s stomach twists. How many times has he looked at Steve with that same expression of _you’re absolutely crazy, but I’m going to go along with this stupid idea because I trust you?_

“What do you want to do, ask them what number they’re thinking of? Just because we’re copies of them doesn’t make any of us psychic.”

“If you’re really me, then I know you’ve been in love with Bucky since 1936,” Big Steve says abruptly.

Bucky, Fake Bucky, and Tiny Steve all turn and stare at him. Then Fake Bucky snorts. “You’re an idiot, Steve.”

“That’s you, all right,” Big Steve says, in an eerily perfect echo of Tiny Steve’s tone from a few minutes earlier. No, wait, Tiny Steve is the echo of him. Shit, he was wrong, this actually _can_ get weirder.

“Okay, listen, don’t shoot me, I’m just reaching for a radio,” Fake Bucky says—no, fuck that, from now on the little asshole is gonna be _James_ —and Bucky keeps the rifle trained on him while he detaches a walkie from his belt and brings it up to his mouth. “Hey, Larry,” he says, “we need you down here, pal.”

“Barnes, I keep telling you, it’s perfectly fine to lock the lions in the same room as the gazelles, they won’t eat them,” says a voice on the other end of the walkie. “Lions don’t hunt unless they’re hungry, and you know, you might even say ours are _stuffed.”_

James and Tiny Steve wince in unison, as if the awful joke causes them physical pain, before Tiny Steve leans over to speak into the handset. “This is serious, Larry,” he says. “We just caught three people trying to break into the museum, and you are not going to believe who two of them look like.”

“Trying, hell,” Bucky mutters, because there’s such a thing as professional pride. “We’re in, aren’t we? And we’d be long gone by now, too, if that bear downstairs didn’t have an attitude problem. What’s with you?” he asks, because Big Steve is grinning at him.

“Wouldn’t lock the predators in with the prey,” he says. “See that, Buck? There’s no version of you that isn’t a big softie.”

Larry, meanwhile—whoever Larry is—is laughing on the other end of the walkie. “Oh, man, intruders,” he says. “This should be fun. I’ll be right down.”

James says nothing; he’s busy scowling at him and Big Steve, trying to look fiercer than he is, an expression Bucky clearly remembers cultivating during the war. Tiny Steve looks at them both for a minute, shrugs, and goes up to Big Steve, tipping his head to the side and staring as he walks a slow circle around him. Bucky wavers, wanting to turn the gun on this potential threat to the real Steve, even though the laughably nonthreatening Tiny Steve is setting off his protective instincts even more than the Steve he _knows_ is real. In the end, though, Tiny Steve is in no danger, and apparently, he knows it. “Huh. So that’s what I got turned into,” he says, inspecting Big Steve. “I don’t like it.”

Big Steve does the damn self-deprecating smile that rips Bucky apart every time. “I’m not sure I do either,” he admits. “But, you know, it has its moments. I can reach things on high shelves now. No asthma’s good. Actual functioning immune system, so helpful.”

“I’d tap that,” says James. “What?” he says, when both Steves turn to look at him. “Tell me it didn’t cross anybody else’s mind.”

Bucky gets real interested in the rifle for a minute.

Fortunately for him, the elevator dings, and the guy who steps off it is the most blessedly ordinary-looking guy Bucky has ever seen. He’s wearing a security guard uniform, he’s got a walkie and a gun and a flashlight on his belt and a nametag that proclaims him Larry Daley, Head of Security. He’s followed by a tiny stegosaurus about the size of a large housecat, which makes little _gronk_ ing sounds as it scrambles into the lobby.

This _is_ a dream, Bucky decides. He was wrong, it is possible to dream in cryo, and he’s dreaming. Or his damaged brain has just decided to save itself the effort and give up on this whole sanity business for good. Possibly both.

Larry stares back and forth between the 1940s Steve-and-Bucky and the modern ones for a minute. “You,” he begins, and shakes his head in disbelief. “You’re, you’re Captain America,” he says, and makes what is, even for a civilian, an absolutely terrible attempt at a salute. “I wrote a paper on you in grade school. It’s an honor. Sir.”

Bucky holds back a sigh. _Fanboys._

Steve knows how to deal with this, at least. He walks straight up to the guard and shakes his hand, before the guy can even collect himself enough to reach for any of his gear to call them in to Homeland Security, or the FBI, or whoever is currently hunting them. “Larry Daley,” he says, reading off the guy’s badge. “Where are you from, son?”

“Uh, Brooklyn. Sir.”

“Good man. Us too,” Big Steve says, indicating himself and the real Bucky.

“I know. Uh, sir. Uh, Captain. You’re kind of a legend back home.” He blinks and shakes his head, and then he comes back to reality enough to turn to James and Tiny Steve and say, “How did you two troublemakers cook _this_ up? Neither of you even knows how to use a computer!”

“You’re blaming _us_ for this?” James says, affronted, from where he’s kneeling on the museum floor, scratching the stegosaurus under the chin. “I didn’t even know _he,”_ he points at Bucky, “was still alive, and you better believe I have some questions about _that,_ by the way!”

Larry glances at Big Steve, who he’s obviously decided to treat as the authority figure in this situation. “You probably have some questions, too,” he says. “Come with me.”

 

“‘The Tomb of Ahkmenrah,’” Bucky reads from the plaque on the wall. They’ve all trooped in here together and are standing in a row under the stony gaze of two jackal-headed statues: Bucky, Wanda, Big Steve and Tiny Steve, James, Larry, and the tiny stegosaurus, which is curling itself around James’ leg like it thinks it’s a cat. “So you got a dead Egyptian guy in your museum. What’s that got to do with the price of beans?”

“Okay, this might be a little hard to swallow,” Larry begins, “but you see that gold tablet on the wall over there? Well, the fact is, it’s—”

“Magic?” Wanda places one black-nailed hand on Larry’s chest and very gently pushes until he steps out of her way. Then she walks purposefully up to the tablet in its glass case and lifts her hand. A red glow surrounds her fingers, and the tablet abruptly lets off a flare of white light, almost as if it’s responding.

The two statues both turn their enormous jackal heads, in unison, to look directly at her.

“Please don’t do that,” says a voice behind them. Bucky turns, metal arm raised and ready, but the newcomer is just standing a polite distance behind them, not making any threatening moves. “It’s safer not to agitate them.”

“Oh, yeah. Everybody, this is Ahkmenrah,” Larry says. “Ahkmenrah, meet Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and Wanda Maximoff. Well, you already know the museum versions of Rogers and Barnes, but these are the originals.”

“How very fascinating,” says the guy who is absolutely, definitely not a whatevereth-century Egyptian pharaoh, because that would be ridiculous. He bows to Wanda. “Madam, it’s an honor to meet a modern sorceress.”

“You’re not the same as they are,” Wanda says, with a glance at James and Tiny Steve. “I can feel your mind in a different way.”

“Yes,” says Probably-Not-Really-Ahkmenrah. “They are models. I was a human who was born, lived, and died. But every creature in the museum is brought to life each night through the power of the tablet, and returned to their natural form at dawn.”

“Bull _shit,”_ says Bucky.

“Yeah,” says James. He’s picked up the little stegosaurus and flipped it over into the crook of his perfectly normal-looking left arm, holding it carefully around the plates on its back while he gives it a belly rub. “That’s what I said on my first night here, too. It’s true, though. Ahkmenrah and most of the animals, they’re real—they’re dead, but they’re real. Stevie and me, we got started in a custom mannequin factory in Baltimore.”

“At least it wasn’t Jersey,” Tiny Steve murmurs.

“We got all the memories that you two would’ve had, though. Same personalities, too, based on what we both remember about each other from before. But we only remember up till the time of the displays we’re in, so everything else we know is from books. And he,” James looks meaningfully at Bucky, “died in 1944, according to every single one of ’em.”

“The displays you’re in?” Big Steve repeats. “Why would they have either of us in the Museum of Natural History?”

“‘The 1940s: The Dawn of Genetic Manipulation,’” Tiny Steve quotes, with heavy irony. “Couple years back, when _you_ woke up, people got real interested in you and Project Rebirth again. The museum decided to capitalize on it, put up a new display. They got the actual machine Howard Stark built and everything. During the day, I’m strapped into the machine like I’m about to get the serum. You go around a corner and there’s a sort of hologram thing of post-experiment me out in the room, so kids can go stand by it and see how big Captain America is. We turned it on one night to talk to him, but, uh. The last thing he remembers is, you know,” he nods toward Bucky, “the train, and that put him in a pretty dark place, so he asked us not to bring him to life again.”

“And I,” says James, “get a _super_ fun display where I’m shooting one of the HYDRA wolves. You remember,” he says to Bucky, “the ones they turned loose in that skirmish a couple days before Azzano?”

“HYDRA had wolves?” Big Steve repeats, startled. “Bucky, you never told me about that.”

“Genetically altered wolves, yeah,” James answers for him. “HYDRA loved playing God, and their SOP was always the same: bigger, louder, more teeth. One of ’em got shipped home and stuffed, it’s nightmare fuel, I don’t know how the museum got it. Fortunately, this one’s apparently pretty traumatized from getting experimented on and then killed, so every night when it wakes up, it just runs off and hides in North American Mammals until morning.”

“Jesus,” Bucky says softly. Yeah, he remembers those animals—and he remembers the Army trying to squash the story of them, too, not wanting to start a panic over the fact that the Nazis were manufacturing monsters. Never figured he’d feel sorry for those ugly sonsabitches, but that story hits a little close to home.

Steve sees his expression change and reaches out to squeeze his right arm before he remembers that he’s still not supposed to touch Bucky and pulls back. “Sorry,” he says. Bucky doesn’t know whether he means about the touch, or about the fact that he’s just now realizing how much shit Bucky saw in Europe before he got there, although knowing how Steve does guilt, it’s probably both. He turns and looks at the museum crew, Larry and James and Tiny Steve and the pharaoh, and shakes his head. “Museum exhibits coming to life? I’m sorry, but this is a little hard to swallow.”

“I don’t see why,” Bucky says. “You pal around with the actual Norse god of thunder, don’t’cha? Come to think of it, weren’t Asgardians on the planet around the same time as the pharaohs? I wouldn’t put it past Loki to come up with something like this. Hey, Ahkmenrah, was there an Egyptian god of mischief and chaos and just sort of general fuckery?”

“That would be Setesh, who you may know better as Set,” Ahkmenrah says thoughtfully, “and the magic in the tablet is sometimes attributed to his influence, yes.”

“Ha! I knew it. That tricky bastard gets everywhere. What?” Bucky says, when he realizes everyone is staring at him. “Why is everybody always surprised when I know stuff? I was ‘an excellent athlete who also excelled in the classroom.’ I read that in a museum, so I know it’s true.”

“You’re a smartass, is what you are,” Big Steve says, a smile playing around his lips. “And you can’t believe everything you see in a museum. They got your birthday wrong on that exhibit, for one thing. I sent them a letter about it.”

“And God save us all from your _strongly worded letters,”_ says James. “If you’d’ve had Hitler’s mailing address in 1938, we never would’ve had to go to war.”

“Christ,” Bucky says, looking at Steve, “was I really that much of a little shit?”

“See, what’s funny about that is that he’s using the past tense,” Clint says in their earbuds.

Big Steve has the nerve to laugh. Hmph. See if Bucky ever cooks magwinya for him again.

“Personally, I don’t think we’re the ones who have to justify being in this museum,” Tiny Steve says, and Bucky thinks, _uh-oh._ “You three are the ones who broke into our home. What are you up to?”

“We need something you have here,” Big Steve says, meeting his eyes without flinching. “It’s important.”

“Why?”

Big Steve glances at Bucky. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“So get talkin’. Because we have all night,” Tiny Steve says, “but I doubt you do.”

Bucky watches Big Steve search for words and realizes he’s trying to figure out how to explain the last seventy years in a way that won’t hurt him. Well, it’s not as if Bucky wants to hear this again, and he imagines Steve is going to find it hard enough with only James in the room. “You know what, I’m gonna wait for you out in the hall, if that’s okay,” he says, and sees Big Steve— _his_ Steve—nod in poorly concealed relief and switch his comm to receive-only mode, so he won’t have to listen in.

Ahkmenrah’s tomb is in a little alcove outside the Hall of African Peoples. Bucky takes himself out into the gallery they just walked through, where he startles a couple of gazelles that are poking their noses into a potted plant. So James didn’t lock them up with the lions after all. Bucky catches himself grinning, then remembers that Daisy’s got the camera feeds turned on and forces his face into a neutral expression again.

Abruptly, the gazelles raise their heads, one after the other, looking down the hall. Then they take off in big bounding jumps, and Bucky gets that sinking feeling again. “Hey, Daisy,” he begins, “I don’t suppose you can see—” And that’s as far as he gets before the rhinoceros charges around the corner.

Bucky throws himself to the side as, at a conservative estimate, twenty-five hundred pounds of black rhino thunders past, its massive flank missing him by inches while he flattens himself against a wall. The rhino doesn’t look any more pleased than he is; it tries to put on the breaks, skids, and careens around a corner, hooves scrabbling on the marble floor. “Shit,” he hears himself gasp.

“Bucky!” Daisy says sharply. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Technically, he’s fine, but he’s panting, and without even realizing it, he’s drawn the Gerber Mark II on his belt. There’s absolutely a zero percent chance a seven-inch blade would be effective against a rhinoceros, but that’s not what he’s worrying about right now. “Hey, Daisy, I think something scared that thing. I’m gonna go do some recon and find out what it was.”

“Hang on, Barnes,” Sam says, “you can’t just go charging off without backup.”

If it had been anybody but Sam saying it, he would’ve listened. Really, he would’ve. But Sam? No way in hell Bucky’s gonna let him be right. He looks up, finds the nearest security camera, and raises the middle finger of his metal hand at it.

So of course, it’s probably inevitable that this is the exact moment when something hits him in the back of the head and everything goes black.

 

Bucky comes to tied to a chair in a damp, poorly-lit room, which is not a situation designed to improve his peace of mind, to say the least. He’s struggling almost before he’s fully awake, and he knows right away that he’s not tied very well; somebody has used whatever they had to hand to immobilize him in the short term—some traditional rope, a couple of electrical cables, and some troublesome nylon packing straps holding his metal arm to the arm of the chair, but even those he could get around, given time. What’s really going to keep him in the chair for the next little while is the man in the suit and glasses, standing three feet in front of him and aiming a Luger at his face.

"Guten Abend, Herr Barnes," he says. "Ich heiße Heinz Kruger. Sollen wir reden?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Readers, you are the ABSOLUTE BEST, did you know that? The comments on this fic are making me phenomenally happy. 
> 
> This was so fun to write. As usual, special credit to Robyngoodfellow for indispensable plot assistance.
> 
> I went down the most incredible avenue of research on the basis of one throwaway line in this fic, so if you, like me, feel a sudden curiosity about how museum models get made, you should go look at [http://www.museumfigures.com](http://www.museumfigures.com/).
> 
> When I was at AMNH, I made sure I took a photo of the smol stegosaurus.


	7. freight car

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh noes. I had to go back and rewatch the Steve-embiggening scene in TFA twice to catch Heinz Kruger’s alias. I hope you appreciate the trials I’ve endured.

“What do you mean, the cameras are out?”

Steve—Daisy’s version of Steve, not the fun-sized one who lives in the museum—isn’t shouting exactly, but his voice is tense, and Daisy is scrambling for a reply that isn’t along the lines of _I have absolutely no idea what’s going on._ She didn’t think higher-stress situations existed than the ones she’s been living for the last four years, but whether Coulson’s hero worship has rubbed off on her or whether Steve Rogers really is as much of a precious cinnamon bun as he seems, she does _not_ want to fail the man. “Everything just went to static. I’m resetting the system now.”

“Daley, has this ever happened before?” Steve asks.

“Yeah, every night when we switch shifts. We have an override,” Larry the security guy says. “Wouldn’t make much sense if we left video footage of living museum exhibits lying around for the daytime team to find, so we dump the footage to an offsite server around dawn. Only go back to check it if there’s a problem.”

“You already have a wipe system?” Daisy asks. “How? It took me ten hours just to code the signal diverters!”

“We’ve got a guy who’s really good with computers,” Tiny Steve says. “He’s part of my exhibit, actually. Fred Clemson, from the S.S.R. He was interested in coding, so Larry got him some books and an old laptop and he picked it up really fast. Some people just have that kind of brain, I guess.”

“Clemson?” Big Steve repeats. “I don’t remember a Clemson.”

“Well, I’ve seen the photo the curators based my scene on, and he’s definitely in it. About six feet tall, dark hair, blue eyes, glasses?”

Daisy punches the final key, and the video feed on her screen springs to life just in time for her to see all the color drain out of the bigger Steve’s face. “Okay, everybody sound off now,” he says, his voice suddenly sharp and urgent. “And Bucky, I need you back here ASAP, okay?” After a beat, when there’s no answer, Big Steve says tersely, “Come on, Buck, this is no time to screw around.”

Wanda is already in motion, moving past Big Steve toward the hallway. Steve is behind her by the time she drops to her knees and picks something up from the floor. “Is this—”

“B.B.’s earbud,” Daisy says, heart sinking. “If this guy’s good with computers, he would’ve known right away that it could be tracked, so he ditched it. I don’t understand, though—I thought I knew the super-serum story backwards and forwards, and I’ve never heard of a Fred Clemson.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Big Steve says. His voice is low, and dangerous, and Daisy is suddenly very glad she’s a safe distance from any and all enemies of Steven Grant Rogers, past and present. “He was the HYDRA agent who killed Abraham Erskine and tried to steal the serum. You said your memories only go up to the moment of your exhibit, right?”

“Yeah,” says Tiny Steve, with a look of horror. “I read about what happened next, but all I remember is lying down in the machine and then waking up in the museum. My God, are you saying—”

“Yeah,” Big Steve says. “Your so-called Fred Clemson is in the history books under his real name: Heinz Kruger.”

 

“Who the hell is Heinz Kruger?” Bucky says, but he doesn’t expect an answer. Villains don’t really run around revealing their plans like in spy movies. That doesn’t stop him from making his own assessment of the guy, though, and he doesn’t like what he sees. The guy’s suit, haircut, and polished shoes would have fit right in on the streets of New York in 1942, but a German name, a German gun, and enough of a vendetta to kidnap a stranger… Is there some museum exhibit about Nazi spies? And if so, how the hell do those young lunatics upstairs not lock it down first thing every night? When he gets out of here, he’s going to have _words_ with James about this.

“You will not ask questions,” Kruger snaps. His accent is far from the worst Bucky’s heard; he could probably pass for American pretty easily if he tried. “I know who you are, Herr Barnes. Or should I say, Wintersoldat.”

It’s not easy—okay, it takes a heroic level of effort, under the circumstances—but if there’s one thing Bucky Barnes is good at, it’s mouthing off. “You and everybody else with an internet connection, pal,” he says. “So what’s your beef with me? Did I kill one of your Nazi buddies in the war?”

“You Americans,” Kruger says. “You always think it’s personal. We share a mission, you and I. I began it many years ago. You will help me finish it tonight.”

“The fuck I will,” Bucky says, planting his feet on the floor. He’s not going to wait around to find out if this asshole has any of the HYDRA reset codes or not. One explosion of motion, and he’ll be free of the bonds and lunging at Kruger—

Or he would be, if Kruger didn’t choose this moment to fire the gun into Bucky’s thigh.

Bucky screams, doubling over as far as the cords and straps will let him. The Asset could shrug off pain as long as it didn’t get in the way of the mission, but Bucky doesn’t have most of that conditioning anymore, and this fucking _hurts._ One part of the programming is still there, though: there’s a little part of his brain that keeps analyzing the situation after the pain kicks in, and it decides the fact that Kruger doesn’t react—doesn’t even change expression—is bad news. If he’s willing to let his prisoner yell like that, then he’s confident that nobody can hear them. That gives Bucky a momentary surge of panic, but he fights it, focusing his attention on working out where they _are_ instead.

They’re still in the museum, he decides, but they must be deep in a sub-basement. The old wooden roller chair he’s tied to faces a row of shelves filled with hand-labeled jars that contain shadowy specimens floating in formaldehyde. There’s just enough dust and grime to imply that people don’t come down here a lot, but a few surfaces have been dusted off, trash cleared away. This isn’t the first time Kruger has used this spot, then. He’s probably been coming down here for a long time, scoping out potential bolt-holes and escape routes.

Bucky should be worrying about that, but honestly, he’s pretty busy just hoping they’re far enough away from Ahkmenrah’s magical doohickey that those things in the jars aren’t alive. Of course, the minute he thinks of that, his eyes are drawn to the nearest shelf, and whether it’s a trick of the light or things are actually wriggling in there, he wishes he hadn’t thought about it.

Kruger, meanwhile, has produced a pair of handcuffs, and Bucky’s hands are shackled behind his back before he can pull himself together enough to struggle. Kruger moves _fast—_ where the hell did he get his training?—and it’s only a second later that the gun barrel presses against his temple. “Now,” he says, “as you Americans say, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. If I even think you’re going to fight me, I won’t hesitate to kill you.” His smile is very animal. “And you know I’m telling the truth, because we’re both _Menschenmaterial,_ you and I.”

 _Menschenmaterial?_ That's a weird choice of words. Sure, Bucky has heard it before, but never used quite that way. Kruger says it as if the two of them were interchangeable cogs in a machine, as if—and then his stomach lurches, because now he knows exactly where Kruger got the kind of specialized training that allows him to put up a pretty good showing against a super-soldier.

He knew he wasn’t the only Winter Soldier. It’s never occurred to him until now that he might not be the only Asset.

He feels the panic rising again, and for once he manages to lock it down with sheer willpower, because he has seconds to weigh his options, and all of them are bad. Bucky is definitely stronger than Kruger, and faster, and his training spans seventy years and two continents, but Kruger, like the good little Asset he is, has made sure he has every possible advantage. Cuffing his hands was fucking clever; sure, he could free himself with the metal arm, but he’d probably break his other wrist in the process, and he can’t do it in less time than it would take Kruger to shoot him. If he were to throw himself sideways just right, he might be able to jerk out of the path of the gun, but if he miscalculates by a hair, he’ll have a bullet in his brain.

Bucky is suddenly glad he’s the one Kruger took, and not Steve, because Steve might have gone for it—and he might even have won, because he just has that kind of luck. But Bucky doesn’t, so he’ll take the choice that gives him the best chance of survival, at least for now. “Okay,” he says quietly.

Kruger takes a walkie—the same slightly outdated version that James and Tiny Steve carry—out of his jacket pocket. He’s good; the gun barrel doesn’t even waver while he presses the button and says, “Captain Rogers, can you hear me?”

There’s a moment of dead air, and then the walkie crackles and Steve, definitely _his_ Steve, says, coldly, “Kruger.”

“Good,” Kruger says. His matter-of-fact tone is so much like Bucky’s own, from the days when he was an Asset giving mission reports, that it sends a chill through Bucky—or at least, he hopes so, because the alternative is that he’s going into shock. “I have something that belongs to you.” He kicks the chair, and Bucky lets out a little sound of pain before he can help himself.

“Bucky.” Steve’s voice sounds dangerously close to breaking. “Are you okay? Talk to me, buddy.”

“Don’t you fucking dare give this HYDRA creep a goddamn thing, Steve!” Bucky shouts. Then he gasps again when Kruger jostles the chair a little harder. The bullet wound is starting to throb in time with his heartbeat, and the pain is reaching an almost nauseating level.

“Enough, Herr Barnes, _”_ Kruger says. “Now, Captain Rogers, are you ready to make a trade?”

Quietly, in that tone that means he’s just barely keeping his temper under control, Steve says, “What do you want for him?”

“I want the Tablet of Ahkmenrah,” Kruger tells him, “and I want Abraham Erskine. You have one hour. After that, your friend is dead.”

 

It’s like walking back into 1943 again.

Well, okay, it isn’t exactly. The introductory corridor of the Genetics exhibit is standard museum fare: text-heavy wall displays talking about mDNA and genome mapping, microscope images of double helixes and a side note titled “What Is A Mutant?” that might interest him a lot under different circumstances. But once he’s in the second room, his eyes skip over all the other displays, going straight to the super-soldier machine. Seeing it here brings it all back: the churning in his stomach, the wild, crazy _hope._ And, of course, the moment he glanced across the room and realized Howard Stark was behind the controls of the machine and thought, _Shit, I’m gonna die._ He can laugh about that part now, but at the time…

“Hey.” Kid Bucky—who has grudgingly agreed to be called James for the duration of the current crisis—bumps Steve’s shoulder, hard. “What’s with the cow eyes, Rogers? We’re on a clock here.”

“Sorry.” Steve shakes his head. “It’s just that this is where everything changed. For the first time, anyway.” He doesn’t mention that when things _really_ changed was the day he lost Bucky, even more so than the day he woke up seventy years in the future.

“Hell yeah, I get that. You know when everything changed for me?” James says. Before Steve can tell him he doesn’t have to talk about any of it, he says, “This one day when I was just a kid, I was minding my own business, walking home from school, when I ran across this tiny, mouthy little punk who was getting his ass handed to him in a fight with three bigger kids. That was the day my life went to shit.”

Tiny Steve slugs him on the shoulder, affectionately. “Let him be. He’s been through a lot, and he misses his Bucky pretty bad,” he says.

Steve feels a sudden sharp burst of… not nostalgia exactly, but longing for something that never was. Okay, so realistically, it would have been absurdly hard for them to be together back in the day, maybe impossible. Even without the social pressure and the religious pressure, they’d both wanted families, children. And he’s not sorry about what he had with Peggy—she was amazing, and he doesn’t regret a minute of it. But lately, the thing that keeps him up at night is knowing that they’d both loved each other for years before the war, and not only did he hide his feelings, he put on such a good act that it made Bucky ashamed of feeling the same. For a guy who prides himself on always being honest, that’s one bitter pill to swallow. And aside from that, he’s known Bucky so well for so long that he can almost hear the little nagging voice that lives in the back of Bucky’s head nowadays, asking what happens if he never gets better. Steve knew how desperate he had to be when he voluntarily went back into cryo; it would’ve been like him getting into another Valkyrie and crashing back into the Arctic ice. That was when he really understood that saving Bucky would be about a lot more than keeping him safe from the wrath of Tony Stark and a handful of world governments. It would be about convincing him that he’s worth saving.

“There’s no Howard Stark in this display, is there?” he asks, shaking off the feeling.

“Nope,” Tiny Steve says. “Stark Industries wouldn’t sign off on the museum using his image, and they’re big enough donors that the Board didn’t want to piss them off.”

“Well, it’s probably for the best,” Steve admits. That would’ve been an awkward conversation, to say the least. He can’t put off what he came here to do any longer, though. He steps through the doorway, into the dim nighttime lighting. The man he came here to see is smaller than he remembers, but that’s probably because he formed his impression when _he_ was smaller, and the wrinkle lines around his eyes might be made of polystyrene, but the eyes themselves are still just as kind as they were the last time he saw them, in 1943.

“Dr. Erskine,” he says.

“Steven.” Erskine steps forward, openly staring. That’s right; this version of Erskine would remember administering the serum, but he’s never seen the final result, or at least, not in the flesh. He stares for a second or so, and then he says, “Did you do what I told you?”

“You mean, did I stay a good man?” Steve shakes his head. “I don’t know, Doc. I hope so. If we have time, I’d like to talk to you about that later. But right now, I need your help.”

It only takes a few minutes to fill in the broad brushstrokes of the problem, and when he finishes, Tiny Steve is the first one to speak up.

“I say we give Kruger the tablet,” he says.

James blinks at him. “Don’t be a shithead. This isn’t just about us,” he says, and down by his feet, the little stegosaurus _gronk_ s in what sounds curiously like agreement.

“We’re museum exhibits,” Tiny Steve says, cheeks flushed, voice heated. “We’re not really alive. I know we feel like it, and God knows I don’t want to give up what we’ve got—” He blushes even brighter when he says that, as if his feelings weren’t already obvious. “But these are real people we’re talking about, real lives on the line.”

“Jesus, Stevie,” James says. “I wasn’t talking about us here at the museum. I was talking about, y’know, _him._ The real Bucky Barnes.” It’s harder to tell with his coloring and the dim light, but he’s looking a little flushed, too. “The guy is… look, I never deserved you and I got you anyway, which is more than I ever expected, and—let me fucking finish, wouldja?—and no, of course I don’t want to stop coming to life, but that’s not the point. You love the other Bucky because he’s still me, just like I love that big musclebound jerk over there because he’s still you in every way that matters. But I lost people to HYDRA before you ever came to Europe, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to what that other Bucky went through. There’s no way he’d let you hand over Dr. Erskine and his formula to an actual HYDRA Nazi. Hell, he’s probably _praying_ right now that you won’t give Kruger what he wants, or put yourself in danger rushing in to save him, either. Because I know if it was me, I’d have to count on you to be stronger than I am. Strong enough to do the right thing.”

Both Steves are still staring at James when Sam Wilson’s voice cuts in suddenly over the comms. “So this is all very sweet and everything,” he says, “but why are you three even talking about this when we’re obviously gonna go rescue the dumbass?”

“Yeah, and no heroing it up hero-style, rushing in there alone and going, ‘Take me instead,’ Steve,” Clint adds. “You have a team. Use it.”

“Look, I never intended to go… heroing in,” Steve tells him. “And I don’t intend to give Kruger the Tablet or Dr. Erskine. No offense,” he addresses Tiny Steve, “but you think like I thought before I was a soldier.”

“No offense,” James shoots back, “but I hope my Steve never _has_ to think like a soldier.”

“Believe me,” Steve says, “so do I. But I do have a plan. I came here to ask Dr. Erskine if he’s willing to give us part of the formula—enough to string Kruger along, just long enough to let us get a man in who can take him out. And I have just the man for the job. Scott, are you up for it?”

“You want me to beat up Kruger for you?” Scott’s voice comes over the comm. “Are you kidding, sir? This is great! I mean, not great that there’s a Nazi running around, obviously. But I mean, in terms of stuff you dream about when you’re a kid, fighting Nazis with Captain America is… Uh, yeah. I’m in.”

“There’s still a problem, though,” Wanda says. “We don’t know where Bucky is. Kruger could have him anywhere in the museum, and even if we split up, it would take an army to search this whole place in an hour.”

“Uh,” says Larry Daley, when they all turn to look at him, he says, “I might be able to help with that.”

 

“Just so you know,” Bucky tells Kruger, “I’m pretty sure I’m bleeding to death over here. I mean, I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, and I’m not expecting you to care on account of you’re an evil motherfucker and all, but you probably want me to stay alive until you make your trade. Turning over a wounded hostage is smart, Steve will be so worried about patching me up that he’ll let you go, but if I die, he’s gonna come after you and literally rip your head off. If you let me have one hand free, I could at least put some pressure on the wound.”

Kruger makes a little scoffing sound. He’s settled himself in a chair opposite Bucky, the Luger resting under his fingers. He hasn’t taken his eyes off Bucky once. He’s obviously not going to fall for this old trick; even if he only got an early version of the Asset training, Kruger’s still ten times more competent than the average HYDRA jerk. “One little bullet isn’t going to kill the famous Wintersoldat.”

“You sure? ’Cause shock from blood loss is a thing, even for super-soldiers, and I’m definitely feeling a little tachycardic over here.”

Kruger shakes his head. “I know the program that made me. The weak ones died quickly. The ones who endured through the training—like you and I, Herr Barnes—were not weak. We were the survivors.”

Endured? Heh. That’s one way to put it. “Yeah, for all the good it did you,” he says. “How does it feel to know the real you died for nothing, Kruger? HYDRA fell. That big blonde guy upstairs, he’s thwarted you guys twice now, and it didn’t take him much more effort to trash the plan it took Zola seventy years to set up than it did to wreck the Red Skull’s little shitshow in 1945. What are you planning to do when you get out of here, anyway? Even if you do get the super-serum formula, there’s no HYDRA left for you to give it to.”

“Your Captain Rogers cut off one head,” Kruger says, with a thin smile.

“And two more shall take its place, blah blah hail HYDRA, except it _doesn’t fucking work,_ pal. Doesn’t matter what you assholes do, Captain America is always gonna be there to fuck up your shit. If truth and justice won’t do the trick, he’ll get it done with pure damn pigheadedness. But hey, by all means, you go ahead and try to bring HYDRA back, if it makes you happy. Take the Tablet and Erskine and run around the country from midnight till dawn, hoping you stumble across some rogue HYDRA base the Avengers haven’t trashed yet, and then hope they’ve got a scientist who can make some serum and start the whole super-soldier program up again. Seems totally reasonable to me.”

“I see why your handlers put a muzzle on you,” Kruger says, with deep contempt.

Bucky is about to ask him if he wants to come over here and do something about it when a flash of motion catches his eye. Something is moving at the base of the heavy door six feet behind Kruger, and his first thought is, _oh, shit, don’t even tell me we got cockroaches to deal with now too,_ but then he sees… What? The thing that’s crawling through the gap where the door has warped away just slightly from the frame isn’t a bug at all; it looks to all accounts like a tiny person. And it isn’t Scott Lang, which would almost make sense, because he’s got that suit that shrinks him down in some sciencey way that Bucky hasn’t even tried to wrap his head around, but a… Well, as ridiculous as it seems, it looks like a Roman centurion, with a little spear and a feathered helmet and everything. He stands up, brushing dirt off his armor, looks at Bucky, grins, and actually gives him a tiny thumbs-up before he crawls back through the gap.

“What the fuck,” he says softly.

Kruger looks at him flatly. “Don’t insult me, Herr Barnes. Are you really trying the old what’s-that-behind-you trick? No wonder HYDRA fell, if they had no better Menschenmaterial than you.”

“Now that’s just rude,” Bucky says, but he’s suddenly fighting down a laugh, because he’s now absolutely certain that he’s hallucinating. The last time that happened to him was in Kreichsberg, when he was so far out of it that the next day, he had to ask Steve six times whether Johann Schmidt had really pulled his own face off before he believed it. “Oh, man, I’m gonna die,” he says, and if he didn’t already know he was in shock, the fact that that sentiment makes him start giggling would be the clincher. “I’m gonna bleed to death in the basement of a museum with a wax Nazi from 1943 and the last thing I see is gonna be _that?_ I thought I’d had a weird life before, what with the dinosaurs and the demons and the goddamn bears, but this just takes the fucking cake.”

“Stop talking,” Kruger snarls, but Bucky barely notices, because now things are getting even better: a teeny tiny _cowboy,_ of all fucking things, is climbing through the keyhole of the locked door and swinging himself up to throw a lasso around the handle that turns the deadbolt.

Oh God, his poor brain really has finally given up. Well, honestly, that’s kind of liberating. It means he can stop pretending to have any sanity left whatsoever. “I’m sorry, am I bothering you?” he says. “So if I just started, you know, talking a lot, that would be a thing that bothered you?”

“Your tricks won’t work,” Kruger says, oblivious to the miniscule drama going on behind him as the cowboy starts climbing the rope, slips, dangles precariously for a moment, then finds his footing and gets moving again.

“So don’t talk, got it. Just gonna sit over here being quiet. Look how quiet I am. Hey, do you like music?” Kruger just gives him the death glare again, so Bucky says, “I’m gonna take that as a yes. _Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell—”_

“Gott im Himmel,” Kruger mutters.

 _“Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings,”_ Bucky continues, louder now and just a little off-key. _“From the moment I saw him I_ —oh, hey, Scott,” he says, and for all Kruger’s big talk, he does look, he _has_ to look, which means he turns around right as Scott Lang is expanding back to full size and winding up for a punch.

Lang knocks Kruger backwards into the racks of shelves. Boxes fall, glass shatters, and wow, Bucky really did not need to know what decades-old formaldehyde smells like, but somehow Kruger picks himself up. Lang has shrunk back down to bug-size by then, but Bucky hears him yell, “Get out of here, Barnes!”

Bucky doesn’t have to be asked twice. He jumps up and bolts for the door. His hands are still shackled, and his leg doesn’t want to bear his weight, both of which leave him too useless to help Lang, but at least he can get somewhere safe and not be any more of a liability. He staggers toward the door, where the little cowboy is swinging from the door handle—he swears to God he hears a muted _yee-haw,_ but persistent hallucinatory cowboys are a thing he can figure out later—and shoulders the heavy door far enough open that he can get through it and start running.

He finds himself in a long, dark hallway, with a red EXIT sign at the far end, and heads toward it at the fastest walk he thinks he can manage. But he only makes it a few steps before he stumbles, and he barely manages to avoid a full faceplant on the slick marble floor. He gets up and limps a few more steps before his legs go out from under him again, and this time he half-catches himself against the wall and only goes down on his knees, but it’s still unreasonably difficult to get back up. _Shit._ He’s in worse shape than he realized. _Just get as far as the door,_ he tells himself, _get out of this hallway and there’s gotta be a video camera and Daisy will see what’s happening and send somebody to…_

Then there’s a sharp _crack_ from the storage room behind him, and a scream, and Bucky knows that Kruger has just shot Lang, and that if he doesn’t reach that door—maybe even if he does—he’s next, and he also knows that the door is still ten feet away.

He makes it to his feet, anyway, before Kruger steps through the doorway. He’s not sure what he’s trying to prove, but he looks back at Kruger evenly and meets his flat, dead stare. Yeah, Kruger is definitely an Asset, all right. And Assets don’t hesitate, they don’t make smug speeches, and they can’t be reasoned with. They just raise their guns and—

The gunshot that rings out isn’t Kruger’s pistol. It takes Bucky a moment to register that, even though he sees Kruger go down and watches the gun fly out of his hand and into a dark corner. Kruger isn’t dead—if these museum exhibits even can die, which is something Bucky really wishes he knew at the moment—but under the suit, his right knee seems to be flattened out of shape somehow, damaged by the shot. Kruger goes for the gun again, or at least, tries to, but a voice behind him says, “I wouldn’t, my friend,” and when Kruger keeps moving, a bullet strikes his opposite shoulder, leaving him lying broken on the museum floor, unable to even crawl.

“Watch out,” Bucky says, turning around to face his rescuer. “Most of those HYDRA guys, they have a cyanide capsule that they… oh, no. No, no, no. There is no fuckin’ _way.”_

“Profanity is the parlance of the fool, young man,” says his rescuer, who is, in no particular order, carrying a rifle, sitting on a horse, and giving Bucky a look that suggests he expected to find him considerably more impressive than he actually does. “But you appear to have had a difficult evening, so I suppose that just this once, we’ll let it slide.”

Bucky, shaking his head, leans back against the wall and starts laughing, helplessly, while Theodore Roosevelt winks at him, clucks at his horse, and rides down the museum hallway. One thing’s for sure: Steve Rogers is gonna get along with this guy just fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's not where that chapter was supposed to end, but I'm cutting it off because I've gone long enough without an update. *crosses arms and glares at chapter*
> 
> People sometimes ask me how on earth I came up with a certain line or scene in this series. Since that question could pretty much apply to this whole chapter, I’m just gonna tell you what I tell them: I can’t be responsible for what happens in my brain.


	8. nine

James and Tiny Steve are lying on the floor of the Planetarium with the projector on, watching the bright artificial stars drift slowly overhead. Since they both woke up in the museum, this has been their hideaway when they want privacy, separately or together. Larry occasionally jokes with them about their not-so-secret makeout spot, and sometimes it is, but mostly, it’s the equivalent of the fire escape at the old Barnes apartment in Brooklyn: it’s where they go to have the kind of companionable solitude where they can talk or not as the mood strikes them. Steve draws, James reads, they listen to the little transistor radio Larry gave them, and sometimes they just lie on the floor like they’re doing now, wrapped up in each other’s arms with Tiny Steve’s head on James’ chest, enjoying the luxury of being this close without embarrassment or worry or guilt.

Well, without _much_ worry or guilt, anyway.

“I feel terrible for them,” Tiny Steve says, in sync with James’ thoughts, as usual.

“Me too,” James says. “I mean, as bad as the other Bucky had it, losing an arm and being tortured and brainwashed and all, it was nothing compared to what the other Steve went through, being deprived of _me._ Not to mention never, ever, ever getting laid, poor bastar—ow. Stop it, punk, that hurts.”

“Then stop being a jerk. What happened to the other Bucky was horrifying.”

“Yeah, I think it freaked me out less when I thought the real me was dead. But seriously, what they did to the other Steve was pretty rough. I know you wanted to beat the Nazis, but you never wanted to spend the rest of your life fighting. You wanted a world where people didn’t have to. And now he’s stuck in a world where he had to go to war against his own friends.”

“At least he and I started out wanting to fight. No version of you ever did.”

“No, we never did.” James sighs. “I don’t know what you and I are supposed to do about it, though. I mean, we’re museum exhibits.”

“Well, you know Bucky better than anybody. How do you think he’s feeling right now?”

“Are you kidding me? He’s feeling fucking _scared,_ obviously.”

“Of what?”

“Everything,” James says. “Scared he’ll never be able to trust himself again. Scared somebody will use him to hurt people again. Really scared of accidentally hurting his Steve. Most of all, scared because he doesn’t think he’s worth everything his Steve had to give up to be with him and he figures his Steve is gonna wind up regretting it for the rest of his life.”

“Really? You could tell all that from watching him?”

“Well, it isn’t all new,” James says. “I was terrified the whole time I was in the war. Not just of going into battle, but also of what it was turning me into. Or… no, not that it was changing who I was, exactly, but that it was bringing out a side of me I’d never wanted to admit I had. I found out I was willing to do whatever it took to survive, however ugly it was—and sometimes it was pretty fucking ugly. And I couldn’t stop comparing the guy I saw in the mirror to the guy I knew you were inside, even before I found out you literally jumped on a grenade for a bunch of strangers.”

“Okay, first off, the fact that you had to do awful things to survive doesn’t make you an awful person,” Tiny Steve tells him. “In fact, I think you’ve got it backward. You were strong enough to do what you had to even though you hated every second of it. And second, you yelled at me for _days_ after you found out about the dummy grenade.”

“Yeah, I yelled at you because I didn’t want _you_ to be a heroic dumbass. Didn’t mean I didn’t wish I could be one.”

“You always sell yourself short,” Tiny Steve says. “I think half the time you were braver than I was, because I was too dumb to know when to be scared, and you were scared, but you did what you had to do anyway. Think I’m starting to get an idea about how we can prove something to your real-life counterpart, though.”

“If you say so.” James leans over to press a kiss against Tiny Steve’s neck. “After all, you’re the brains of the outfit.”

“Damn right I am,” says Tiny Steve, and cuddles up a little closer. Then he says, “Hey, where’s Steggy?”

 

Bucky wakes up to the feeling of a wet, sandpapery tongue on his face. He opens one eye and finds the tiny stegosaurus standing on his metal shoulder, licking him determinedly, as if it’s trying to singlehandedly save him from some horrible fate. It takes him a minute to work out that he’s lying on the platform inside the open super-soldier machine, where he laid down to let Dr. Erskine patch him up. Erskine… now there’s a thing. All this time, he’s sort of hated Erskine for dragging Steve into the war while he was trying to keep him out of it, but now he gets why Steve used to talk about him so much. He kind of can’t help but like the guy, especially when he realizes that he and Erskine kind of have a lot in common: they were both forced to work for HYDRA against their will, they both wanted to use whatever power they had afterward to earn themselves some redemption, and of course, they both saw something in a little guy from Brooklyn a long time before anybody else did. Just so long as Erskine remembers that he might’ve been an early member of the Steve Rogers Fan Club, but Bucky Barnes is still the founder.

Anyway, it seems like he drifted off after Erskine declared him out of danger and went off to work on Scott’s injuries, and James must’ve left the little stegosaurus to stand guard over him while he slept. He grins at it, sits up, and scoops it up in his left arm like he saw James do, scratching it under its chin, which makes it _gronk_ with happiness.

“Well, I guess I don’t have to ask which Bucky I’m talking to,” Steve says.

Bucky looks over at Steve, who’s sitting on a low stool by some kind of mechanical console—probably where Howard Stark would’ve been, if they’d gotten permission to put him in the exhibit. He’s not surprised to see Wanda and Larry-the-security-guard standing nearby; he is surprised to see that Sam, Clint, and Daisy have made their way inside as well. “You guys are all here?” he says. “Jeez, how long was I out?”

“Years,” Sam says brightly. “It’s 2040. Our President is a plant!”

“Fuck you, Wilson. Steve already tried that trick.” Bucky puts the stegosaurus down, reluctantly, and faces them all. “Is Scott okay?”

“He’s fine,” Clint says. “That suit of his is almost as good as Kevlar. He’s kind of thrilled, actually. Can’t wait to tell his daughter he cracked a couple ribs helping Captain America fight a Nazi.”

“Scott’s the only one’a y’all big folks with a lick of sense, if y’ask me,” says a voice that Bucky doesn’t recognize. He looks around until Larry moves closer and points to the breast pocket of his uniform, and then his jaw drops.

“Okay, please tell me somebody else sees the cowboy and the Roman soldier in Daley’s pocket,” he says.

“No, Buck,” Steve deadpans, “he’s just happy to see you.”

Bucky laughs, and everybody else groans, because apparently nobody appreciates good comedy anymore. “Now there’s a thought,” Bucky says. “Steve, what do you think we’d have to do to get a model of Mae West in this museum?”

“Who’s Mae West?” says Clint.

Bucky stares at him, then at Steve. “Movie marathon, when we get back to Wakanda?”

“I’m thinking movie marathon on the _plane_ back to Wakanda,” says Steve.

“As much as we’d all love to let you two tell us all about the newfangled talking pictures,” Sam says dryly, “we do still have a job to do here, Steve, and she’s not gonna wait for us forever.”

“She? You’re gendering the magic rock now? That’s weird even for you, Wilson.” Bucky stands up carefully, testing his leg. It’s not pleasant to put weight on it, but God knows he’s survived worse. “Okay, what untold dangers stand between us and the meteorite?”

“Oh, Ghengis Khan, a handful of cavemen, and a couple of walruses that don’t like to stay in the Ocean Life exhibit,” Larry says. “The good news is, you probably don’t have to worry about the giant squid.” When Bucky slumps, he grins. “Relax, man. Teddy’s gonna go with you and help you avoid any trouble with the locals.”

As if by magic—well, actually, it is by magic, isn’t it?—Theodore Roosevelt strides into the exhibit. “Ah, good, you’re awake,” he says. “How’s the leg, young man?”

“I can walk on it.”

“Bully!” Roosevelt says, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Don’t say that,” Bucky says. “It’s one of Steve’s trigger words. Also, I just realized I’ve got a bone to pick with you, buddy. Do you know you’re directly responsible for one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me?”

“Bucky,” Steve begins, “if this is about President Roosevelt’s foreign policy or something, I don’t think it’s fair to blame him for—”

“No, Steve, I’m talking about the _goddamn Bucky Bears._ You,” he tells Roosevelt, “you were the one who started the whole teddy bear thing that caused me so much grief in 1944.”

“Are you saying they named a toy bear after you as well?” Roosevelt grimaces. “My God, son, I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how I despised those wretched things.”

“What’s a Bucky Bear?” Sam says, and Bucky realizes his mistake seconds too late. “Daisy, don’t you dare,” he says, but Daisy has already whipped out her phone and pulled up a photo.

Bucky closes his eyes, but not before he’s seen the look of utter bliss on Sam’s face. Whether or not Wanda can fix his brain, crawling back into a cryo tank tomorrow night is suddenly looking like a much more attractive option. “Okay,” he says, “let’s go get this over with.”

 

Dripping wet, limping, and annoyed as hell, Bucky says, “I thought Larry said we _didn’t_ have to fight a giant squid!” as they all stumble into the annex in front of the Hall of Meteorites.

“He said _probably_ not,” Steve says, as if that makes it better. He’s as soaked and bedraggled as Bucky and there’s a sucker mark on his arm the size of a baseball, but he’s laughing, and so is Roosevelt, who is clearly having the time of his life. Wanda managed to keep the squid from doing serious damage to any of them, but Clint’s the one who finally drove it back to its own exhibit by putting an arrow in its maw while Sam distracted it by zipping around the high ceiling to draw its attention. (As a result, Sam is the only one of them who didn’t get wrapped up or bashed by a single tentacle, which means Bucky would have even more of an excuse to hate him even if he hadn’t started calling him “boo bear” every time he gets the chance. Bucky has already grimly accepted that his chances of ever living that down are less than zero.)

The main entrance to the hall is blocked by a heavy iron grate. Wanda uses her red glowy magic to unlock it, and Steve heaves the heavy bars open and steps aside, motioning for Wanda and Bucky to go in first.

Meteorites never interested Bucky much when he was here as a kid, and they still don’t look like anything but chunks of rock to him, although the one in the middle of the room is still pretty damned impressive: a huge clump of iron that’s bigger than a car. At some point in his life, he heard it was so heavy that the supports it sits on are drilled into the bedrock under the museum so the floor won’t collapse. But none of that is what gets his attention.

“It’s about time you got here,” says the woman leaning against the meteorite, and Bucky feels his heart start to race. She has red hair, and she’s dressed casually, but Bucky isn’t fooled by that for a minute; that outfit was carefully chosen in case she got into a fight, and she’s probably got five different weapons concealed in it. He knows this because he knows her: knows her from the fight at the airport mostly, and before that from being sent to kill her in Washington, D.C., and before that, he’s almost sure he recognizes her from another mission outside Odessa.

Clint starts to take a step forward, but Steve puts his hand out and stops him. He steps inside first instead, wary, as if he’s expecting a trap. For a minute, Bucky wants to scream at the dummy that of course it’s a trap, and that they should just _shoot_ her already, except that then he realizes something: Steve might be cautious now that he sees her, but he isn’t even a little bit surprised. It’s right there in his voice when he says, “Hello, Natasha.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Chapter 8 is titled "Nine" for good and legitimate reasons that I'm sure I will think of eventually.


	9. daybreak

“So, a magic museum where things come to life at night,” Natasha says to Steve, with exaggerated casualness. “Did you know about all this when you chose it as the rendezvous point, or was it a pleasant surprise for you too?”

“I had no idea,” Steve says. “I chose it because I knew Bucky would remember it.”

“Is that a problem these days?” Natasha says, turning her attention to him. When their eyes lock, she says, “Do you remember me?”

Bucky thinks about saying, _You’re Natasha, I read about you on the internet,_ but the last time he tried that gambit, it didn’t go over well. “Odessa,” he says instead. “Maybe ten years ago, I think? I had a mission. You got in the way and I shot you.”

“So what you told Stark was true? You do remember all of them?”

Bucky doesn’t bother to answer her. He turns to Steve instead, and say, “There was never any magic rock that could fix my brain, was there?”

“No,” Steve says softly. “I’m sorry, Buck.”

“Is this a trap, then?” The plates in Bucky’s left arm are sliding up and down. “Did you make a deal with Stark to bring me in?”

“No! God, no,” Steve says, sounding genuinely shocked. “Bucky, how could you even think that?”

“What am I supposed to think? She’s _on_ _his side,_ Steve.”

“I’m not on Tony’s side anymore,” Natasha says evenly. “I’m not on Steve’s, either. But I don’t have to be to think you should have this.” Bucky tenses even more when she reaches into her jacket, but what she removes from it isn’t a weapon. Well, not a conventional weapon, anyway.

It’s a red leatherbound book, with a black star stamped on the cover.

Bucky has a moment of such blinding panic that he’s hardly aware of Sam Wilson moving past him, grabbing the book and handing it to Wanda, who tucks it away, out of sight. “Wow,” he says, “did you really just bring a Russian speaker here with a Russian code book and not realize this might be a _triggering event,_ Steve? I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”

Steve’s eyes widen in horror as Sam’s words sink in; he reaches toward Bucky, involuntarily, and Bucky takes two full steps back before he realizes what he’s doing, and this is great, just _great,_ because that’s going to hurt Steve more than if he threw a punch. He can’t even deal with how fucked up the whole situation is right now, so he does what he always does: he falls back on mouthing off. “You couldn’t have put that in the mail, Romanoff?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, Barnes,” she says, with the ghost of a smile. “No one uses the post office anymore. Besides, I wasn’t going to let the only copy out of my hands.” She pauses to let that sink in, and nods when she sees him register the significance of that. “No photos, no backups, no digital scans. Maybe a neuropsychologist could use it to reverse-engineer what they did, but I won’t blame you if you just burn it. Either way, it’s your decision who has access to it now.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Because I know what it’s like to be unmade,” Natasha answers. She’s not looking at him; she’s looking past him, at Clint. That makes Bucky wonder if Clint is as blindsided by this as he is, but he can’t tell, because Clint’s super-spy poker face is almost as good as Natasha’s. It almost makes him wish he still had the Asset’s blank stare, instead of a face that gives everything away.

“Thank you, Natasha,” Steve says. “I hope this won’t cause any trouble for you.”

“I doubt Tony will throw anything at me that I can’t handle.”

“Tony’s not the one I’m worried about. I know you know what you’re doing, but… just know that there’s a place for you in Wakanda if you ever want it.”

“Does T’Challa know you’re making that offer?” she says, raising an eyebrow.

“He told me to make it.”

That surprises a smile out of her. “I’ll keep it in mind,” she says. Then she turns back to Clint and says, “Walk a lady to the door?”

Bucky has no idea if Natasha and Clint have spoken since they traded punches in Berlin, but he’s not going to deny them a chance to say whatever they need to say to each other. He steps out of the way as Clint offers Natasha his arm in a gesture of exaggerated chivalry, and she takes it, nodding to Sam and Wanda on her way to the door. Roosevelt tips his hat to her, and she shoots him a bemused look before she gives in to his weird charm and smiles back at him. Then they’re gone, and the silence lasts just long enough to get awkward before Sam says, “Barnes? You okay?”

Bucky isn’t, but he nods anyway. “Thanks for the save back there.”

“Don’t think for a minute that this means you’re off the hook about the teddy bear thing,” Sam replies, which almost makes him smile for real. Almost.

“So what happens now?” Wanda asks. “Are we just going home?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so. Just give me a minute, okay?” Bucky slumps, leaning against the big meteorite. There’s a sign that specifically says not to do that, but if the thing survived flying through space and crashing into a planet, it can hold the weight of a tired ex-assassin for a minute or two.

Sam glances at Wanda, and the two of them make a silent mutual decision to give him the room; Roosevelt looks hard at Bucky, then follows, leaving him with only Steve standing in front of him. From the set of his shoulders, he’s obviously waiting for Bucky to berate him for his stupidity, like he’s done so many times over the years. It would be funny, if Bucky wasn’t so goddamn tired.

“So,” he reiterates, “this mission was always just a rendezvous to get the book, and there was never anything in this museum that could help me.”

“That’s right.”

“So you lied.”

Steve meets his eyes. “Yes,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because you weren’t getting any better in that cryo tank,” Steve says, and there’s a hard edge to his voice now, like he’s starting to be angry—with Bucky or with himself or with the world in general, God only knows. “You were scared to be out in the world after what happened to you. You knew you could be turned into a weapon at any time. But that’s true of all of us, Buck. The Red Room did it to Natasha, Loki did it to Clint, HYDRA did it to you and Wanda, Wanda did it to Bruce, plain old fear did it to Tony, and SHIELD did it to me. That’s why I wouldn’t sign the Accords; I didn’t want to be used again. So I get it. I really do. But if I learned anything from being an Avenger, it’s that locking yourself away from the world doesn’t work. Maybe you can’t do any harm, but you can’t do any good, either.”

“So what? You’re the one who always wanted to be a hero. I’ve known I wasn’t one since 1943.” He looks Steve straight in the eye and asks, “Why did you really wake me up, Stevie?”

“Because I missed you,” Steve says quietly.

Bucky’s laugh is dark and bitter, and it takes on a weird echoey effect in the mostly-empty room. “God,” he says, “you’re _compromised._ That’s what this is. You think you’re in love with me and it’s making you stupid.”

“I don’t _think_ I’m in love with you, Bucky. I know it. After everything we’ve been through, give me that much credit.”

“You’re wrong, though. You’re in love with the guy you think is still in here, under all the conditioning and trauma. But I’m not sure I ever was that guy, Steve, not even before HYDRA got me. And it was bad enough when you were just putting yourself in harm’s way for somebody who doesn’t exist, but now you’re taking chances with other people, too. What if Natasha had been working for Stark and ratted us out? Or what if Kruger had shot Wanda, or Sam, or one of the others? You just got them out of superhero jail, and you put them right back in harm’s way because of me.”

“It was their choice to come, every one of them. They’re here because they care about you.”

“Don’t be an idiot. They’re here for you, not me. Steve, you should’ve believed me when I said I wasn’t worth all this.”

“You’re worth it to me.”

 _That just proves you’re stupid,_ Bucky almost says; the words are there, and so’s the old half-frustrated, half-affectionate tone that it would be so easy to fall back on. But he doesn’t, because this isn’t a thing to joke about anymore. “When we get back to Wakanda,” he says, “I’m going back into cryo. And this time, I’m going to make it Sam’s call if I wake up again, not yours.”

“Did you just say ‘if’?” Steve says, in disbelief.

Which is why, all told, it’s a pretty convenient time for a scream to echo down the hallway.

 

Bucky despises running. It’s a sentiment that goes back to his Howling Commandos days, when running usually meant one of Steve’s plans had gone sideways and they were running for their lives, and it only got worse when he was weighed down by his old metal arm. The new arm is lighter, sure, but if he was going to test it out in a footrace against Steve, who has the real super-soldier serum instead of the knockoff version he was given, he’d rather do it when he hasn’t been _shot_ in the last few hours. If there’s something dangerous outside, there’s only one way he can realistically get there first.

So he trips Steve, and then he pelts past him, down the hallway.

Behind him, he hears Steve say, “What the hell, Buck,” as he gets up to come after him, but Bucky has the lead now, which is how he makes it through the Hall of Human Origins and into the Grand Gallery before Steve does. And when he bursts into the Gallery, his heart falls all the way down into his boots. Because of course, of fucking _course,_ there’s only one thing it can be, right?

Yeah, it pretty much had to be the T. Rex skeleton. Fossil, whatever. The point is, it’s a huge dead dinosaur, and it’s standing over a woman with dark braided hair and what Bucky would have called an Indian costume, before the Thanksgiving lecture where Daisy brought him up to speed on Native American issues. Anyway, she’s cowering, and the T. Rex is roaring—how the fuck does a dinosaur with no throat manage to roar?—and Bucky doesn’t stop to think at all before he leaps between her and it and shoves her back toward the door. “Run,” he yells at her, and spins around to face what is, second only to the code words in the red book, his actual worst nightmare.

The thing about the fossil dinosaur is that there are no soft spots to hit, but it still has just as many claws and teeth. As the empty eye sockets swivel to stare at him, he realizes the problem isn’t only that he doesn’t know how to kill a thing like this; it’s that he doesn’t even know how to _fight_ a thing like this. Guns and knives will be laughably useless, and even the hardest punch he can throw with his left arm won’t make a dent. He bets Wanda can take it apart with her weird magic, but someone’s going to have to hold it until she gets here and obviously, that somebody has to be him and…

Damn it. He doesn’t want to die and have his last interaction with Steve be one where he was a complete jerk. But when the massive head comes down toward him, there’s absolutely nothing Bucky can do except raise his metal arm over his head, close his eyes, and pray for a miracle.

The fossilized snout of the T. Rex bumps against his arm, gently. Then there’s a clattering sound, and he opens his eyes to find that it’s just dropped what looks exactly like one of its own rib bones at his feet.

He blinks. Is… is this dinosaur _wagging its tail_ at him?

“Look at this,” James says, as he walks into the gallery. “Rexy’s trying so hard to get you to like him, and you’re breaking his heart. C’mon, Barnes, throw him a bone.”

“I don’t believe it. Larry’s rubbing off on you and your jokes are actually managing to get worse,” Tiny Steve says from behind him, brushing past Big Steve, who’s standing in the doorway. “Thanks, Sacagawea,” he addresses the woman, holding up his hand for a fist bump, which she returns before she goes over to stand by Roosevelt, who puts his arm around her.

“Excellent acting, my dear,” he says, and she shrugs, as if pretending she’s about to be eaten by a dinosaur is all in a day’s work for her.

“You set me up,” Bucky says, in complete disbelief. “You _assholes.”_

“Language,” the Steves say together, with identical subtle glances at Sacagawea. Because undead dinosaurs are one thing, but God forbid he should swear when there’s a lady present.

“Oh, all of you, just relax,” James says. Since Bucky is just standing there like an idiot, he leans down and picks up the rib, which he hurls across the gallery. The T. Rex lights out after it and snaps it up in its stony jaws, and Bucky can’t do anything but shake his head. “He was never in any danger.”

“Yeah, but _he_ didn’t know that! What did you think you were _doing,_ Bucky? Why did you trip me?”

“Because I knew you were gonna get here and reach for that stupid shield of yours and realize you left it in Siberia,” Bucky says, since apparently he has to state the obvious now. “And then you were gonna rush into whatever was going on anyway and probably get yourself killed, and I have—oh, screw it, make your own joke about me being armed, but I do have a built-in weapon, so I knew I had a better chance than you.”

Big Steve actually facepalms at that. “I can’t believe you. You ran right towards trouble without any backup—”

“Remind you of anybody?” Tiny Steve says.

Bucky blinks. “Oh, God,” he says. “I really _am_ turning into you.”

“Uh, I hate to break it to you, buddy, but we’ve always been like that,” James says. “Maybe you don’t remember that the only reason you’re friends with Steve is because you jumped into a fight where he was getting the crap kicked out of him. And then you both went home bloody and your dad yelled at you to stay out of other people’s business, and you said, and I quote, ‘I couldn’t. It wasn’t fair.’”

“I don’t remember that,” Bucky says, without thinking.

“Well, lucky for you, one of us has a brain that hasn’t been hibachi grilled,” says James.

 _“Bucky,”_ Tiny Steve admonishes.

James shrugs. “The point is, pal, you spent your whole life thinking you wanted to keep your head down and stay out of trouble, but you were always more like Steve than you knew. When it came down to the wire, you always threw yourself in harm’s way to save other people. Hell, I bet that’s how HYDRA played you, isn’t it? Bet they told you that you were doing an ugly job for the greater good.”

“How the hell did you know?” Bucky says, because it’s perfectly true. It makes him feel sick now, remembering Pierce—by far the most effective handler the Asset ever had—telling him that he was working for the good of mankind.

“Because that was pretty much all that kept me going in the War,” James says, which Bucky has to admit is a fair point. “And that’s who you still are, under all the awful stuff that’s happened to you. You just proved that with Rexy. Speaking of, hey, buddy,” James says, turning around. The tyrannosaurus is coming up behind him, rattling the floor with every step; it has the rib bone in its mouth, and it drops it in front of James and looks at him as expectantly as a dinosaur skeleton can look, until James flings it toward the other end of the Grand Gallery and it dashes off in pursuit.

“You know, Barnes really is almost as dumb as you, Rogers,” Sam agrees from behind Big Steve, and Bucky starts. When did he catch up to them? “Kept jumping in front of me when we were fighting that spider child in Germany. I sure as hell wouldn’t have done that for him.”

“Kiss my cryofrozen ass, Wilson,” Bucky replies, in a pleasantly conversational tone. Really, though, he’s just a little overwhelmed that they all see him so differently than he sees himself—and that they might not be wrong. He still doesn’t feel like a hero in any way, shape, or form, but given the evidence, he has to admit that it maybe it _is_ in his nature to run toward danger and try to help. On the other hand, as much as he loves Steve, he’s not entirely pleased with the idea that he _acts_ like Steve.

“Heart of a hero, mouth of a sailor,” Big Steve pretends to grumble, as if Bucky can’t see him trying not to laugh. “So,” he says to Bucky, still with his fake stern face on, “is this finally going to be enough to convince you that you deserve a fresh start?”

Bucky doesn’t answer, but he thinks, _Maybe._

 

He doesn’t know why he even bothers to be surprised that a security guard and a bunch of museum exhibits know how to throw an amazing party.

Ahkmenrah has queued up some rock music over the museum’s sound system; Bucky doesn’t recognize it, but Daisy does, and she thinks the lyric _up all night to get lucky_ is absolutely hilarious in this context. She’s currently attempting to show a bunch of cavemen some dance moves, which they’re pretty bad at, but it’s making her laugh. He still needs to get to the bottom of what’s going on with her, but it’s good to see some proof that she can still have a good time.

The ex-Avengers, meanwhile, have spread out throughout the Rotunda. Wanda is talking traditional magic with a Yakut shaman who’s working on a degree in comparative religions over the internet, and Clint, who looks a lot more peaceful after his talk with Natasha, is doing trick shots with his bow for none other than Attila the Hun, who’s laughing and applauding every hit. Scott, by virtue of being a normal-sized person who voluntarily shrinks down into a small-sized person, has been granted an honorary godhood by the miniature Romans, and the cowboys have loaned him a horse so he can ride around the diorama, shouting the approximately three Latin phrases he knows and making up for the fact that he’s badly mangling all of them with his boundless enthusiasm.

Sam has wandered off to chill in the Birds of New York exhibit, which Bucky is going to give him so much shit about later.

Steve is still deep in conversation with Theodore Roosevelt—the two of them are fucking peas in a pod; Bucky lasted until he heard Roosevelt say, “If I must choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness,” and then decided to make himself scarce before Steve started up on one of his own inspirational speeches—so he’s sitting on the information desk, watching Tiny Steve and James dance to the modern music, both of them laughing. Bucky can just barely remember the last time he went dancing, and he doesn’t know that he’d be any good at it now, seven decades out of practice, but it seems like it could be worth trying again. That’s such a weird thought that he almost doesn’t notice the two of them whispering to each other, then moving off the makeshift dance floor to approach him.

“Hey,” he says, as they approach. “Not to bring up a sore subject or anything, but I’ve been wondering: what are you two gonna do about Heinz Kruger?”

Tiny Steve’s face twists. “We can’t really permanently disable him,” he says. “Any serious damage we did to him, the curators would just fix it, so he’d come back the next night, and Larry would probably get in trouble for letting it happen.” Which is such a Steve thing to worry about that it makes Bucky smile. “I guess we’re gonna have to lock him up every night from now on.”

“Are you talking about the spy?” Wanda has moved away from the shaman and come over to them. She looks at Bucky, considering, then says, “I could… take care of him, if you’d like.”

“Wanda, even if we could kill him,” Bucky says, “nobody would ask you to—”

“I wouldn’t kill him,” Wanda says, “but I could… change his mind.”

“What, make him not be a Nazi anymore?” Bucky says, frowning.

“I could make him not be Heinz Kruger anymore,” Wanda says, watching him closely. “His cover identity was Fred Clemson, from the S.S.R. I could… make him forget that wasn’t true.”

“Kruger is definitely evil,” Tiny Steve muses, “but up until tonight, I thought Fred Clemson was an okay guy. That could work.” But he and James are both looking at Bucky; this is clearly going to end up being his call, whether he wants it or not.

Bucky sighs. It should be an easy choice; this isn’t even a real human they’re talking about, just a polystyrene museum dummy. But it’s still mind control. “Can you…” he says, and hesitates. “Can you just try to make sure he’s happy?”

Which is absolutely ridiculous; this is a Nazi they’re talking about, someone who might even have _volunteered_ to become a HYDRA Asset, for fuck’s sake. But Wanda takes him seriously, and says, “I can try.”

“Do it,” he says. “And you should probably do it now. It’s gonna be dawn soon, and we need to get out of here.”

“We’ll go with you,” James says. Then, to Bucky’s surprise, he leans in close and whispers in his ear.

“I get that you’re scared of letting Steve down,” he says. “I was too, when I realized it was… when I realized I could have him for real and not just as a fantasy, you know? But once you get over that? It’s better than I ever thought it could be, and I think it will be for you too.”

“I…” Bucky shakes his head. “Thanks.” He manages a real smile. “You’re still an asshole, though.”

“This is the ultimate example of the pot calling the kettle black, pal,” James says, laughing, as he steps back. And then Tiny Steve is there, throwing his arms around Bucky as if nothing has changed at all since 1943, and pulling him down to a level where he can also whisper into Bucky’s ear.

“He still needs you,” he says, tilting his head in Big Steve’s direction. “And he loves you. Be patient with him if he’s really bad at saying so, okay?”

“Haven’t done such a bang-up job with that myself,” Bucky admits, but he hugs Tiny Steve back, hard enough to make him squeak in protest. “Punk.”

“Jerk. Get out of here.” Tiny Steve turns back to James, and the two of them lock hands before they head off to follow Wanda.

Bucky looks around for his own Steve, who’s moved away from Roosevelt and is sitting on a bench, talking quietly and earnestly to Dr. Erskine. Erskine breaks off in the middle of a sentence when he sees Bucky, though, and stands up, patting Steve on his broad shoulders. Then he says, “It was good to meet you, Sergeant Barnes,” but instead of holding out his hand for the handshake Bucky is expecting, he just taps him twice, in the center of his chest, before he walks away.

“The hell was that about?” Bucky asks.

“It’s kind of a long story,” Steve says. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Okay.” Bucky sits down to Steve’s left—a habit he’s never going to break now, even though Steve doesn’t have a bad ear to take into consideration anymore, but it works out pretty good, because it means he can twine the fingers of his right hand around Steve’s and really feel it. His heart starts hammering when he does it, but this time, it’s not entirely because he’s scared. “You were right, you know,” he says. “I was being selfish, going back into cryo. I shouldn’t’ve left you.”

“I was the one being selfish,” Big Steve says. “You wanted to do the right thing. I should have respected your decision.”

“Kinda glad you didn’t,” Bucky says. He takes a deep breath and leans in, intending to kiss Steve’s cheek, but Steve is turning toward him, so he catches the corner of his stupidly perfect mouth instead. It’s awkward and ridiculous and Bucky ends up pulling back, not because he’s freaking out, but because he’s blushing like a goddamn teenager instead of a century-old murder machine. “Are we really gonna be okay, Stevie?” he asks, hating how uncertain he sounds.

Fortunately for him, Steve has always had an abundance of certainty. He gives Bucky that little smile of his, the one that would be a laugh on anyone else but just barely puts those little crinkles around the corners of his blue eyes, and says, “You know what? I really think we are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has descended into EVEN MORE chaos than mine usually do, but hey, it gave me the headcanon of Bucky having American Thanksgiving with the SHIELDies (with Coulson cooking, obviously). Also, consider what adventures Natasha must’ve had in getting into the museum that she glossed over as “a pleasant surprise.”
> 
> One chapter to go! And then I have no current plans for future Team Stego fics, but I said that before I wrote this one, too, so who can say? :)
> 
> Thank you, as always, for reading!


	10. one.

**October 2016**

“Which Bucky am I talking to?” says Steve.

“Gah.” Bucky flops over, pulling the comforter over his head. “You know full well it’s me, you jackass.”

“Hey.” Steve tugs on the blanket, but Bucky has a death grip on it with his metal hand, and Steve, having learned the hard way, gives up rather than risk ripping another comforter and having to clean up all those little feathers again. “Come on, you know the deal.”

“Urgh.” Sheer irritation makes Bucky sit up and brush his tangled hair out of his eyes. Steve, of course, is up and dressed and has probably already done his morning run around the Wakandan palace grounds. Not for a minute does Bucky buy his complaints about the bed being too soft, either; he figures Steve just spent so much of his early life confined to bed against his will that he doesn’t understand why normal people like to stay there past fuck-my-life-o’clock. “Are we gonna go through this every time I wake up for the rest of our lives?”

“It was your idea,” Steve says. “And you know I won’t leave you alone until you give me a memory.”

“Goddammit.” Steve’s stubbornness is an indisputable fact. Bucky free-associates on that for a minute, then says, “Okay, I got one. You remember the time you had bronchitis and I went to the drug store to get you some cough syrup?”

“Just one time?” Steve says dryly.

“Okay, fair, but this was the time I got the kind that was mostly alcohol and what we were politely calling cannabis.”

“Which was legal back then, and we didn’t know any better,” Steve says, quick to go on the defensive.

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me about the state of medicine in 1935. I remember a real medical doctor telling Ma to give the girls that shit when they were babies. And it would’ve been okay for you too, if you’d taken it the way it said on the label, but _you_ decided that if a spoonful was good, then half a bottle had to be better, even though you weighed about eighty-five pounds—”

“Okay,” Steve says. “I remember this one, Buck. You’re good.”

“So I’d been at the garage for maybe an hour,” Bucky continues, “when Arnie Roth showed up and said, ‘Buck, you gotta do something about Steve.’” His voice is starting to break up with laughter. “He said I had to make you go home because I was the only one you’d listen to, but I was busy, and kind of fed up with you, so I said, ‘Nah, let him wear himself out, maybe he’ll at least get some sleep tonight.’ And Arnie said,” Bucky is gasping now, “Arnie said, ‘You don’t understand, Buck, he’s picking a fight with a mailbox and I’m pretty sure he’s _losing.’”_

Steve gives him an exasperated look. “We’ve known each other for almost ninety years, and this is the stuff you come up with.”

“Maybe I’d try to remember some more flattering stories if someone didn’t wake me up at the crack of stupid every morning,” Bucky says. “Come on, I held up my end of the bargain, you owe me something too.”

“You should’ve thought of that before you made fun of me,” Steve says, mock-stern, but he leans down to kiss Bucky anyway, and Bucky latches flesh and metal arms around him and pulls Steve down on top of him. He tastes like sweat from his run and the little green mango-type fruits he likes for breakfast, and if heaven tastes like anything, this is definitely it.

“Come back to bed,” he says, when they separate long enough for him to speak.

“I would, but you need to get up. You’ve got therapy in an hour.”

“Fuck.”

“Language.”

For once, Bucky doesn’t bother to shoot back with something vile in a language Steve doesn’t speak. He just slowly reaches under the bed and closes his metal hand around something soft and fluffy.

It took an international wire transfer to Minnie to cover her trip to Build-A-Bear, and Wanda’s collusion to pick up the package and sneak it to Bucky when Steve was out. But when he hits Steve right in the face with a teddy bear in a Captain America costume with shiny silver stars all over it, and he sees Steve’s expression when he finally gets a taste of what Bucky has been dealing with all these years, he really feels that the effort was worth it.

 

What Steve calls “therapy” amounts to Bucky spending four days a week in a private Wakandan medical facility, doing a scattershot of treatments that might or might not eventually break down the leftover HYDRA conditioning in his brain. It’s hard to be sure, because he took Natasha’s advice and burned the page in the red book that contained the code words; Steve and Sam are the only ones who know them now, in case they ever have to shut him down in an emergency. But the panel of Wakandan doctors on his case have come up with plenty of ideas that don’t take him out of the driver’s seat, things with fancy names like _biofeedback_ and _EMDR_ and _cognitive processing_ and a lot of others he’s lost track of the terms for, along with a rainbow of pills to stave off the flashbacks and bouts of blinding panic that still occasionally crop up out of nowhere. Because as much as he hates admitting that Steve was right, he’s had to accept that there _is_ no easy way to fix his brain. He’s making progress, but even that has been long and difficult and frustrating and some of the hardest goddamn work he’s ever done in his life.

What it hasn’t been, lately at least, is lonely. He still has days when he wants to chuck the whole thing and go back on the run, but if he’d known how much difference it was going to make to have Steve walk home with him at the end of these sessions, and talk him down from the occasional freakout, and let him be when he wants space but also be right there when he doesn’t… Well, he never would’ve left Steve on the riverbank in D.C., that’s for sure. And given how much he regrets the time he’s lost with Steve already, he’s sure as hell not wasting any more in cryo. He’s got way too much to do.

Starting with climbing Steve like a tree as often as he can get away with it. Which is ridiculously often these days, honestly. It’s been a hell of an adjustment: for a long time, every time they’d get close, he’d tense up, afraid of fracturing back into the Asset again if he let his guard down for a minute; and part of him still lives in terror, not so much of hurting Steve physically anymore, but of fucking up in some huge way and letting him down; and another part of him still is having a really hard time staying in the moment and trusting that the world isn’t going to crash down on both of them at any second. And Steve, for his part, was never very good at opening up about what he wanted. But once they got past the initial hurdles and started to figure each other out as lovers and not just friends—or maybe he should say, as lovers in _addition_ to being friends—Bucky was pretty damn happy to learn that he’s not the only one interested in making up for lost time, and that whatever Steve lacks in experience, he more than makes up in enthusiasm.

And speak of the devil—“Hey, Buck?” Steve says, poking his head into the living room. “You doing okay?”

“Yeah.” It takes an effort to hide his smile. Steve probably thinks he’s being subtle by checking in every twenty minutes while he unwinds after therapy, not realizing that Bucky could set his watch by him, if anybody still wore watches. “You wanna watch TV with me for a little bit?”

Steve comes in, and Bucky sits up long enough to let him take a seat on the couch, then flops back down again so his head is in Steve’s lap. Steve obligingly strokes his hair. “Got the mail,” he says. “There’s a letter from Minnie for you. And one from the kids at the museum, for both of us. What?” he says, when Bucky huffs and shakes his head, not quite laughing.

“I was going to say that meeting a museum exhibit of your younger self that comes to life and then thinks he gets to give you advice is a hell of a way to get a pen pal, but then I thought about how much I skipped over to get to that point and I realized that my personal weirdness scale might be a little broken.”

Steve grins. “Maybe a little,” he agrees. Then he turns his attention to the television, which is playing a feature on brightly colored jungle birds. “You know enough Wakandan to follow this?”

“Most of it. Still can’t speak it worth a damn, but give me another month or two.”

Steve shakes his head. “I’ll never understand how you do that,” he says.

“I’m hella smart, is how. Told you, I was an excellent student. Says so in the Smithsonian.”

“Okay, smart guy, then explain to me why you love nature shows so much.”

Bucky shrugs, metal shoulder moving against Steve’s thigh. “Watching animals calms me down, I guess. And I know there’s nothing on these shows that’s gonna trigger me. Even when a predator kills something, it’s to survive, you know? Not because somebody told it to.”

Steve’s fingers stop moving. “God,” he says, “I’m so sorry, Bucky.”

“We’ve been over it, Steve. There wasn’t a damn thing you could’ve done. And if you say you could’ve looked harder for me in 1944, I will get up off this couch and kick your ass.”

“I wasn’t going to. But… you know, I could’ve broken it to Tony about his parents. I could’ve asked him to help me find you, before—”

 _“I_ could’ve not run away from you for two years, but the doctors said I’m supposed to let the past be in the past, Stevie. Now shut up and let me watch the fucking show, would you?”

Steve laughs a little, and then he miraculously does shut up for a while, but it’s not long until he says, “Bucky.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever think about what would make you happy? In the long term, I mean.”

“Sure,” Bucky says. “A pet stegosaurus. I even know where we can get one.”

“I’m serious, Buck.”

“So am I. I’d name it Patton.”

_“Bucky.”_

“Okay, okay. Jeez.” Bucky reluctantly drops the whole scheme he was about to pitch, which would have involved stealing a bunch of baby dinosaurs from what’s left of Isla Nublar and opening Wakanda’s first stegosaurus farm, and says, “I know this is a long shot, but… I’d like to go home, if it’s ever safe. Maybe not to Brooklyn, but back to the States, at least. See Minnie and Pete and whoever else is left of my family. And then, if I get stable enough, I’d like to maybe try being a SHIELD agent for a while.”

“You’d want to go back out in the field? You don’t have to, you know. I know you never really wanted to be a soldier in the first place, let alone for the rest of your life.”

“I know. And before you say it, I really do know the stuff that happened wasn’t my fault. But the thing is, I’d still like to take a crack at balancing the scales. It wouldn’t have to be wetwork, but it could be spy stuff, or rescue. Like the stuff you do for T’Challa that I’m not supposed to know about.”

“It’s not all for T’Challa,” Steve says, not bothering to deny it. “There are a lot of people in the world who need help. And it’s not that I want to keep it from you. But you’re supposed to be recovering, and I’m trying to give you some room to do that.”

“I know that, too. But I got some pretty good anti-HYDRA stuff accomplished when I was less stable than I am now, and it helps when I’m doing something, not just sitting around thinking. …You know, if you ever wanted to give me an audition with your secret Avengers, I wouldn’t have to be right up in the fighting. I hear I’m pretty decent as long-range backup.”

“Really? That something you’d be interested in?”

“Maybe. I mean, now that you don’t have that shield anymore, somebody’s gotta cover your dumb ass.”

“You can’t fool me,” Steve says, smiling. “You love my ass.”

“Okay, you got me. I love your ass.”

Steve squeezes his right shoulder, and Bucky relaxes into the touch and closes his eyes. In the long term, yeah, there are a lot of things he’d like to do. But in the short term? Right here, in this little house on the edge of the Wakandan palace grounds, seventy-odd years and some incalculable number of miles from Brooklyn, happiness has managed to sneak up on both of them. It’s been so long since he saw Steve happy that it took him a while to recognize it, but it’s there when that little crease between his eyebrows softens, when he forgets to stand at military attention and lets those broad shoulders of his relax. And he knows Steve sees it in him, too. It’s the little stuff that keeps getting him: when they brush up against each other in the hallway and he remembers that he doesn’t have to pull away, or when Steve says, “I’m turning in, you coming?”, as if going to bed together is a perfectly normal thing and not something Bucky used to dream about with a complete lack of hope that it could ever really happen. And yet, here they are in 2016, in a world full of high technology and actual fucking magic, and they’re _together,_ and all of it is nothing short of a goddamn miracle.

Bucky is still trying to figure out a way to say any of this, hopefully without having it sound so irredeemably sappy that Steve will either get all choked up or make fun of him for it, when there’s a brisk, businesslike rap on the front door. “I’ll get it,” Steve says.

Damn straight he will, because Bucky can and will play the _I’m recovering from horrific trauma_ card if it means he gets to keep lazing around on the couch. He stretches, yawns, and only snaps back to full attention when he hears Steve say, “T’Challa,” and then, “Your Highness. Come in.”

Okay, so Bucky doesn’t know much about the rules of hanging around with royalty in general, and most of the time he cares about them even less, but the tolerant amusement T’Challa has treated him with so far probably doesn’t extend to letting him stay gracelessly flopped on the couch. Bucky reluctantly stands up, brushing his hair back and hoping it’s not too much of a wreck, and follows Steve to the door.

T’Challa has stepped inside and is looking around in a way that Bucky recognizes: he’s skimming the room and making a mental map of potential weapons and exit routes. It’s a habit that a lot of well-trained people have, so deeply ingrained that they don’t even know they’re doing it, and Bucky approves, right up until T’Challa’s eyes stop on the long bookcase against the back wall. They only own a handful of volumes between them—being a wanted fugitive has made Bucky a big fan of ebooks—and he is _not_ entertained by the way Sam has taken it upon himself to fill the otherwise empty shelves.

 _Don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it,_ he thinks, so of course, T’Challa says, “I think I understand everything except the stuffed bear collection.”

“Ask Theodore fucking Roosevelt,” Bucky gripes, coming up behind Steve and resting his chin on his shoulder.

“Bucky,” Steve says, elbowing him.

“Sorry, I meant, ask Theodore fucking Roosevelt, Your _Highness.”_ Steve glares at him, and Bucky sighs. “During the war, they made these things called Bucky bears, and… well, Sam has eBay, and… it’s a long story.”

“Then you can tell it to me another time,” T’Challa says, eyes gleaming with barely suppressed laughter. “I came with a job for you,” he says, turning to Steve and handing him one of the slick little datapads that seem to be no big deal in Wakanda, even though they leave most of the SHIELD technology Bucky has seen in the dust. “Two of my agents have been captured. If I send my people to look for them, I confirm that they work for me. I want them home safely, and I need it done quietly. Can you help me, Captain?”

This time it’s Bucky’s turn to elbow Steve before he can go into his _I’m not Captain America anymore_ spiel, and Steve takes the hint and looks at the datapad instead. “You know, you didn’t have to deliver this personally,” he says. “I would have come to you.”

“But then I never would have known about Bucky the bear,” T’Challa says, with a broad smile that promises he’s going to get the whole story from Sam in the near to immediate future.

“I hate my life,” Bucky groans, burying his face in Steve’s shoulder.

“And Peggy thought I was dramatic,” Steve mutters, shrugging him off. “Of course I’ll do whatever I can to bring your agents home safely, Your Highness.” And sure enough, there’s the patented handshake-and-shoulder-clasp, the Steve Rogers-is-about-to-run-nobly-and-earnestly-into-deep-shit-again look, before T’Challa makes his usual graceful exit.

Steve stands there for a long moment, looking at the datapad. Then he takes a similar long, thoughtful look at Bucky, who meets his eyes, looks back, and nods just the tiniest bit. “That audition,” he says. “I’m gonna get it a little sooner than I thought, huh?”

“You know you don’t have to,” Steve says, although at this point Bucky can tell he’s just trying to reassure himself that he hasn’t exerted some kind of undue pressure. He wants Bucky to come along almost as much as Bucky wants to go.

“And _you_ know that you have a long history of doing stupid shit when you decide to rescue people who’ve gotten themselves in trouble behind enemy lines, right? Kinda seems like you could use a sensible person to watch your back.”

“So where do _you_ come in?” Steve asks, and Bucky has rarely in his long, weird life been happier than he is in this moment.

“I’ll go get my stuff,” he says.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YAY HAPPINESS OMG.
> 
> And that's it for Team Stegosaurus... FOR NOW. (Although, since this has come up a couple times, I want you to know, dearest readers, that I'll always warmly welcome anyone who wants to send ideas, borrow my handful of OCs, or generally play around in the Stegoverse.)
> 
> Feel free to drop in on either [my fanfic-specific Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/follow-the-sun-fanfic) or [my general Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/lasrina) where I yell about Bucky, feminism, aquatic creatures, and corgis.
> 
> Hugs and baby dinosaur cuddles to all, and thank you very, VERY much for reading!


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